Today, Explained - Trump’s new war on drugs

Episode Date: September 8, 2025

President Donald Trump promised to crack down on illicit drugs. Then, he blew up a Venezuelan vessel in international waters. This episode was produced by Hady Mawajdeh and Peter Balonon-Rosen, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by David Tatasciore and Adriene Lilly, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. A still from a video the White House released showing the U.S. military strike against what it called "Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists." Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You've probably heard by now that the president did a post over the weekend. It's an AI-generated image inspired by the movie Apocalypse Now, but instead of napalming Vietnam, President Trump appears to be napalming Chicago. It's labeled, Shepocalypse Now because wordplay doesn't always have to be good. Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois responded. Take off that cavalry hat, you draft Dodger. You didn't earn the right to wear it. Stolen valor at its worst.

Some guy named Alex responded to Duckworth. I think the bigger issue here is that he posted an image of himself napalming Chicago. Maybe an even bigger issue still is what the president is doing in international waters around Venezuela. That's where he actually blew up a boat, he said, was carrying 11 drug smugglers and their drugs. An actual act of war. A declaration? Legal? We're going to ask on today explained from Vox. But it's not looking great.

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And it looks like Chelsea is coming for another NWSL star. Should we sound the alarm bells? Plus, we weigh in on why Paige Beckers isn't getting the media attention she definitely deserves. Check out the latest episode of A Touch More

wherever you get your podcast and on YouTube. I'm Samantha Schmidt and I'm the Bogota Bureau Chief for the Washington Post. So you're in Latin America. What are the vibes right now? You know, several days, almost a week.

since the president blew up a boat off the coast of Venezuela? Things are tense still. You know, even though we didn't see any major action over the weekend, there's still this feeling that anything could happen right now, particularly in Venezuela. I think ever since these warships were sent to the Caribbean, we've been waiting to see what the U.S. might do in the region, and this boat, I think, put everyone on high alert.

It was a sort of sign that anything could happen and that the U.S. is willing to escalate things to a point we've never seen before. I know after this attack on this vessel, there were lots of unanswered questions. And now that it's been almost a week, I wonder if we have more answers. Can you tell us in as much detail as you can what happened on September 2nd? So we still have a lot of unanswered questions. You know, from the beginning, the Trump administration released this video. We just, over the last few minutes, literally shot out a boat, a drug-carrying boat, a lot of drugs in that boat. Showing how this boat, which was a pretty modestly sized boat, it was not a very big boat, was speeding through the Caribbean, through open water,

and suddenly it was engulfed in flames. And we're not even entirely sure who conducted the strike. But the Trump administration said that they attacked this boat, that 11 people were on board the vessel, all of them were killed. And Trump himself claims that they knew these were drug traffickers. On the vote, you had massive amounts of drugs. We have tapes of them speaking. There was massive amounts of drugs coming into our country to kill a lot of people.

But they didn't identify who the people were on the boat or any evidence that they have justifying this. and proving that they were, in fact, drug smugglers. You see it. You see the bags of drugs all over the boat. There are some indications from local reporting of where in Venezuela it may have originated from, but we don't even have exact evidence of that. We have a lot of drugs pouring into our country,

coming in for a long time. And we just, these came out of Venezuela and coming out very heavily from Venezuela. A lot of things are coming out of Venezuela. We took it out. And Trump has said that these were members of a Venezuelan gang called Trenneragua. We don't have proof of that either yet. Tren de Irogua, some of the worst gangs, some of the worst people, anywhere in the world in terms of gangs.

So there's just a lot of questions, and I think some of the most revealing comments about this came from Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Who said that a drug boat was headed towards eventually the United States. and instead of interdicting it the way that the U.S. usually does on the president's orders, he blew it up. And it'll happen again. And that, according to him, these were drug smugglers

who presented an immediate threat to the United States. But it's not entirely clear to me what he means by that and how these specific 11 people were an immediate threat to the United States. And do we even know if there were 11 people on board this vessel? Because the White House said 11,

You watch the video and it doesn't necessarily look like there are 11 people on board, so maybe they're like below deck, but then how big is below deck? I had questions. Based on the video evidence, you can't really tell. And some have raised questions about why 11, when about this size, you wouldn't need 11 people. You know, there's questions about whether they were all drug smugglers, you know, whether some of them were drug smugglers or some of them were passengers on the boat,

but this is all speculation. I mean, in this region, if it did in fact leave the Venezuelan coast where local reporting has indicated it may have left from, there is drug smuggling that goes on there, right? And there are groups that are taking drugs to nearby Caribbean islands and to the United States, but there's also people who smuggle migrants across these waters.

So it's not entirely clear. But, yeah, we have not gotten that level of detail yet. Got it. Okay, so 11 people aside, drug smugglers aside, a boat was blown up and people died. What do we know about the legality of this move? So the White House has said that this was taken in defense of vital U.S. national interests and the collective self-defense of other nations. The president of the United States is going to wage war, our narco-terrorist organizations.

this one was operating in international waters headed towards the United States to flood our country with poison and under President Trump those days are over. And that appears to be referring to this 2001 authorization for the use of military force enacted by Congress after 9-11. And it authorizes use of force against perpetrators

of the attacks such as al-Qaeda and to prevent, quote, future acts of international terrorism. And the White House has said that that strike was fully consistent with the law of armed conflict. But armed conflict here seems unclear. I mean, there is no armed conflict between the United States and Venezuela.

We spoke with this professor of law at the University of Notre Dame, and she said that this violated international law and that the only time when you can commit a strike like this, it's to protect human life. In an emergency in which you're trying to protect people whose lives are at risk immediately. And I just think that it raises a lot of questions about what the Trump administration is willing

to do outside of war in international waters against people who are presumably sending drugs to the United States, but without or before providing evidence of that. Right. They're saying Trenda Aragua is this terrorist group. Is it even legal to designate Trenda Aragua? as terrorists? Do we know how that works? This is also a question

that has come up a lot because we know that Trenda Agua is a real gang. The Venezuelan prison gang, the toughest gang they say in the world, known as Trendi Aragua. It has spread throughout South America and has caused a lot of damage,

particularly within Venezuelan migrant diaspora communities in the region, and that they have spread and taken control of migrant routes, they extort people. They're a real gang that has caused real damage and has real capacity to expand.

The Trump administration has said that they are invading the United States and that Maluro is directing this invasion. They emptied out, you don't know this, but they emptied out their prisons in Venezuela and they emptied them out into the United States of America. But we have also seen extensive reporting now, including in the Washington Post,

that secret intelligence reports have revealed that that is not true and that it's not Maduro who is directing this gang, you know, to flood the United States and destabilize the United States, and that that is a stretch. Even though, you know, there might be some low-level connections between the gang and the government, this is a leap, according to our reporting. How much tension has this caused between the United States? States and Venezuela.

Quite a bit. And, you know, this is something that Maludo has four years tried to claim in Venezuela that it's, you know, the U.S., imperialist United States, going after Venezuela, trying to destabilize it, the way that they have tried to destabilize countries in South America for generations. And so, you know, this is really in line with his message. And he has taken advantage of it in the last few days in his speeches, you know, saying that the U.S. needs to back down

and stop trying to pursue regime change and that Venezuela will defend its sovereignty. And he has said that he is mobilizing civilians to join these things called militias in Venezuela, which are not known to be the most highly trained, prepared troops in the country. They're often sort of seen as sort of older, retired men, but he's said that he's sending thousands of troops to the Colombian border,

that he's beefing up the military presence in the country to prepare for a possible invasion. And, you know, his other allies, his other members of his government have also sent very strong messages, you know, accusing the U.S. of extrajudicial killings with this strike. even though at the beginning they also claimed that it was AI and that it didn't actually happen and so there's been sort of some mixed messaging on that

but things are getting tense and a few days ago we saw that two Maludo Venezuela and government military aircraft flew near a U.S. Navy vessel in international waters

and yeah the Department of Defense said it was a highly provocative move designed to interfere with our counter-narcotics operations and strongly advised Venezuela not to pursue any further effort to obstruct these operations. So that was a moment where things started to feel like they were really on the precipice of something.

But I think there's this feeling that anything could happen. Samantha Schmidt, Washington Post.com. Over the weekend, our vice president, J.D. Vance, tweeted, killing cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military. Someone wrote back to him, killing the citizens of another nation who are civilians without any due process is called a war crime,

to which Vance wrote back, I don't give a shit what you call it. Perfectly normal behavior on a Saturday morning from our vice president, but a lot of people were shocked. Down in Latin America, though, they've seen this one before. More on that when we're back on Today Explained. Support for Today Explained comes from Quince. Quince wants to remind you the seasons are changing again,

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Mr. President, do you have any reaction to today? It's playing being named the best news show. Wow. I didn't know that. I just, you're telling me now for the first time. We wanted to more deeply understand what drone striking a Venezuelan boat out of the blue meant for the region. Central America, Latin America, South America, the hemisphere. To do so, it's best to look back.

For help, we reached out to Alex Avina. history professor at Arizona State University. I fear that it's not just going to be a Venezuela thing. Prior to making threats against Venezuela and organizing this, what looks like to be a naval expeditionary force, they were threatening Mexico for a few years now. I will order the Department of Defense to make appropriate use of special forces, cyber warfare, and other overt and covert actions to inflict mass.

to inflict maximum damage on cartel leadership, infrastructure, and operations. I will designate the major cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. Promising some sort of kinetic or covert or even drone military operation against so-called drug cartels in Mexico. So I think some of the threats originally were against Mexico, but they decided to act on Venezuela first. Our only interest at this point is making sure that the people of Venezuela, are able to determine their own destiny.

Let's just go back to mid-20-tenths during the Obama administration because that's when we have the designation of Venezuela and President Nicolas Maduro as forming some sort of national security threat. We're not promoting instability in Venezuela. Rather, we believe respect for democratic norms and human rights is the best guarantee of Venezuela's stability, hence our executive order. And then when we get to Trump one, that's when they started to injurely. introduce specific drug trafficking charges against President Maduro.

He is charged, along with his co-defendants, with conspiracy to commit narco-terrorism, conspiracy to import hundreds of tons of cocaine into the United States, and related weapons offenses. So this specific chapter of Venezuela goes back to the first Trump administration in 2020 when they started to go after Maduro on drug trafficking charges. Okay, so that's the first Trump administration. Here we are in Trump to Trump Harder, and he starts... Designating the cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. Tell us about that move.

Who gets designated that way? How much of a game changer is that? This is, in my view, this is the ultimate melding of war on terror with the war on drugs. Because now you can justify any sort of unilateral military operation or action against any of the drug trafficking organizations and gangs that are now designated as foreign terrorist organizations. So there's four or five drug trafficking organizations in Mexico who are part of this list. We have MS-13, and we have Tren Daragua, which is Venezuelan group, and now we have

this A Cartel de Los Soles with a cartel of the Sons. So what we really see is a treatment of drug trafficking less as a crime, and now it's like a national security threat. Because it's a terrorist. And once you label anything a terrorist, you can pretty much justify anything. And that's been like a hallmark of the U.S.-led war on terror since late 2001. Right. We're familiar with that approach from ISIS, from al-Qaeda.

But has it ever been used to combat our drug problem? Not in the way that we just saw with just the taking out of a boat. This is a longer history. It goes back to the 1980s with Ronald Reagan administration. As you know, one of the most critical duties that we faced upon taking office was controlling the influx of illegal drugs into this country. They're the ones who really started to talk about narco-terrorism. Subcommittee on narcotics terrorism, international operations will come to order. Talk about drug traffickers as a national security threat.

Our borders are inundated with more narcotics than at any time ever before. Narco-terrorists that deserve to be treated in a way different than common criminals. A syndicate of organized criminals whose power is now reaching unparalleled heights. But they didn't really act on it. If anything, those early years led to a militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border. But it didn't lead to outright military action against individuals believed or charged to be drug traffickers without much of, or if any, due process. It gets ramped up in, I mean, if you watch movies in 1990s, like clear and present danger, it's kind of like a hallmark of that kind of thinking. These drug cartels represent a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States.

A fantastical rendition of it. But it's really the war on terror with George W. Bush that you start to once again associate drug trafficking organizations with terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda, like Hezbollah. We must stop looking at the drug cartels today solely from a law enforcement perspective and consider designating these narco-trafficking members as foreign terrorist organizations if they are providing material support and assistance to other foreign terrorist organizations. Trump, famously an isolationist, does taking these war-on-terror-like tactics in our hemisphere risk-perlong conflict, risk war? Yes. I mean, and that's what worries me the most, right? So if they engage in military

operations in Venezuela proper, then that's only going to create some of the problems that Trump says he's against, like human movement and migration and the displacement of populations who will leave Venezuela and escape to try to escape potential war. And many of those people will likely try to come here. If they do this in Mexico, it's going to be even a more direct relationship. They're supposedly our ally, our biggest treating partner. There's military-to-military collaboration as of right now involving counter-narcotics operations. So like a Trump decision to attack Mexico would have disastrous consequences. And potentially one would be Mexico turns economically toward China as a way to offset U.S. economic power and influence.

Right. Like if they start doing military operations against so-called drug cartels in Mexico, then you will have human displacement and population movement and maybe even attempt to come into the United States. Honestly, like, what would make a bigger impact is to address the issue of why so many Americans past and present have turned to illicit narcotics. Like, what is it about the United States that has, that makes it such a huge market for illicit narcotics? And this has been a standard for more than 100 years.

Like, addressing it the question or the issue from that vantage point, I think could lead us to much more productive solutions than to bomb boats. off the coast of Venezuela, and then retroactively say, oh, that was a drug smuggling boat. Like, I don't think you can blow your way out of this because you're going to end up hurting a lot of people who have nothing to do with the trade or who just happen to live in the same communities

where these drug trafficking organizations wield a lot of influence. Like, where do you, you know, who's an arco and who isn't a narco? Like, that's a blurry line in between these subjectivities or identities on the ground in certain parts of Mexico and Latin America. I will say that I think maybe Trump and a lot of the people closest to them

have watched like the Cicario movies and they think that real life is going to play out like the Cicario movies. I want to laugh but I want to cry at the same time because I just think they took Taylor Sheridan's work as nonfiction and

that's a scary proposition. Do these Latin American, Central American, South American nations have any requisite? course, if Trump really decides to ramp up here? What are they going to do? I mean, I think we've seen that international law really means nothing now. The UN has lost a lot of his power in the last couple of years, a lot of its influence and authority. I think the only thing they have left to do is what someone like Simon Bolivar, the Latin American independence hero, was trying to do in the

1820s, which is to present a unified Latin America as a counterweight to the U.S. And we've seen this. Like, we saw the president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, say that if Venezuela gets attacked, we essentially take that as an attack on us, and we're going to back them up. Trump just saying that manda his aviones to bombarding, and we're to talk to think, Captain, what we're going to do? So it would be interesting to see if any sort of future U.S. attack on Venezuela will spur, like a regional unification as a counterweight to what the U.S. wants to do with Venezuela and around the issue of drugs in general.

Well, since you're a historian, how? How has that gone in the past when Latin Americans band together Bolivar style to stand up to foreign intervention? Does it work? There's a famous Uruguayan writer, Eduardo Galliano, who talks about how Latin America could be considered to be a series of idiot nations who were trained to dislike one another, and that prevents some sort of unity. Latin America is an archipelago of idiot countries, organized from separation. and trained to dislike each other. You know, part of the U.S. imperial strategy in Latin America is always, is an old one. It's dividing conquer.

But during the so-called pink tide of the 2000s, when the U.S. was busy with invading Afghanistan and Iraq, they kind of turned their attention away from Latin America. And by the time they refocus on Latin America, they saw a bunch of leftist leaders who were working together, leading to, you know, former president of Venezuela-U. Chavez, going to the United Nations in 2006, a day after George W. Bush had been there, saying that, like, the devil had been here. It smells like sulfur. But it'll be interesting to see what happens, because right now Latin America is pretty divided politically.

But I do think that there is a ripple effect from that attack, that all of these governments are talking about, particularly Mexico, particularly Colombia. They're talking about this. All these Latin American countries are having non-public. conversations about the consequences of this bombing. They're just not very public yet. Alexander Avina is an associate professor of Latin American history in the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies

at Arizona State University. Go son, Devils. Hadi Mawaddy and Peter Balanon Rosen produced today. Adrian Lilly and David Tadishore mixed. Amina Al-Sadi edited and Laura Bullard checked the facts. I'm Sean Ramos for him. This is Today Explained.