The President Wants Us To Know He Is Above The Law
“We’re going to kill them, you know, they’re going to be like, dead.” -Donald Trump, President of the United States, talking about continued U.S. military strikes on boats in international waters.
These strikes have targeted people without any public proof that they were drug traffickers, had committed crimes, or posed any kind of real threat. No names. No evidence. Just explosions and bodies.
Since September, there have been at least nine U.S. strikes in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific. About thirty-nine people have been killed, including six in the most recent strike. Boats blown apart by American missiles. Human beings scattered across the water like debris.
And when asked about it, the President, sitting behind the seal of the presidency, doubled down. He said Republicans in Congress “are going to like it, except for the radical left lunatics” who might object.
Those were his actual words. About people whose guilt hasn’t been proven. Whose stories we’ll likely never hear.
And as I sit here writing this, I keep asking myself something I’ve never had to ask before: Are any of us safe to be in a boat while this man is in charge? What’s to stop him from targeting someone who disagrees with him? Or going after a political rival overseas to help one of his authoritarian allies? Or hitting a vessel that just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time?
This is exactly why Congress is supposed to have a say. One person should never hold this much power.
The law is supposed to limit it: yes, a president can act in self-defense against an immediate threat. Yes, they can launch a brief action without permission. But if that military campaign continues, or if it’s not truly defensive, Congress has to approve it. The War Powers Act says the president has to notify Congress within 48 hours, and if they don’t authorize it, the action has to stop within 60 days.
We’re long past that.
Nine strikes. Dozens dead. No oversight. No authorization. No proof this was necessary. And no signs of stopping.
And the worst part? This isn’t even about stopping drug trafficking. We have a real drug crisis in this country: people dying from tainted street drugs, overdoses, lack of treatment. But this? This isn’t about solving any of that. This is theater. A distraction. A way for Trump to look tough while he destroys everything else in the background.
And it’s no coincidence this is all happening during a government shutdown, while Congress is basically on vacation. While the East Wing is being torn down to build his ballroom. While healthcare subsidies are being gutted. While the Epstein files are still sealed. While working families can’t afford groceries.
He’s not hiding what he’s doing. He wants us to know he can do it. That he can kill, without consequence. That no one can stop him.
And that should terrify every one of us.
And maybe one of the hardest parts of all of this happening continues to be how we are just going about our everyday life while he is dismantling our country, one ignored law at a time.
Today was one of those moments. I stopped to pick up groceries and I almost forgot for a moment what we are up against until the cashier started scanning my groceries. It wasn’t lost on me how expensive just one bag of food is now. And as the cashier scanned my items with practiced efficiency, she noticed the meat substitute I was buying. “Is it good?” she asked. We made small talk about protein alternatives and sales prices, the kind of conversation you have a hundred times without really hearing it. Then she said something that made my heart hurt: “After this last bag of groceries is done, my kids know we’re going vegetarian.”
And normally I would celebrate this, but she wasn’t doing this for health. Not for the environment. Not even for the animals, she was doing it for survival.
“With the benefits cuts,” she explained, reorganizing my groceries neatly into the bag, “I need to get creative. Food’s already so expensive.” Then, almost as an afterthought: “I warned them they’ll need to be careful with eating too.”
Careful with eating. A child learning to skip snacks not because they’re full, but because there isn’t enough. A mother who works at a grocery store, surrounded by food she can’t afford, teaching her kids the mathematics of hunger while the President plays with missiles and builds 300 million dollar ballrooms.
Because that’s what matters now. While families calculate which meals to skip, while children learn to be “careful” with food, the President’s press secretary announces his priority: “At this moment in time, the ballroom is really the President’s main priority.”
Not the government shutdown. Not the families losing healthcare. Not the mothers in grocery stores doing hunger math. The ballroom.
That’s where the focus is. Not the hunger. Not the grief. Not the thirty‑nine bodies floating in international waters. Not the mothers warning their children to be careful with eating.
The ballroom.
But for Trump, it’s all smoke and mirrors. It’s gaslighting, distraction, and flat-out lies. And he doesn’t care. He has presidential immunity now, and he thinks that makes him a king. And maybe, in his mind, it does.
The truth is, this isn’t just about a building. It’s about what happens when a government starts tearing itself apart, and lying about it while the country starves.
And this is the moment to ask: where is the Republican Party? Does it exist somewhere in hiding, waiting to be resuscitated later? Or was it swallowed whole by Trump and his MAGA cult?
It’s been on life support for more than a decade. But maybe COVID put the final nail in the coffin, breaking something fundamental in their ability to tell the difference between power and purpose, between loyalty and complicity.
Because when a president orders extrajudicial killings, demolishes part of the White House, puts millions of Americans at risk of losing food and health care, and does it all while blocking the release of what could be the largest sex trafficking file in modern history, and your party stays silent, you’re not a political party anymore.
You’re something else. Something history has seen before.
When Mussolini rose in Italy, it wasn’t because the people were inherently cruel. It was because the party that should have stopped him chose to stand aside, paralyzed by fear, ambition, and denial. When Hitler consolidated power, it didn’t happen overnight. It happened because conservatives who thought they could “control him” handed him the keys, convincing themselves it was temporary. And when democracy fell in Chile, in Hungary, in Spain, it didn’t start with tanks in the streets. It started with silence, from the people who knew better and said nothing until it was too late.
That’s what this feels like now. That same quiet. That same cowardice. That same surrender.
And this isn’t politics anymore. Politics is debating tax rates and education funding. Politics is arguing about infrastructure and spending bills.
This is about whether we’re still a country of laws. Whether Congress still matters. Whether “we’re just going to kill them” is an acceptable sentence for a sitting president to say out loud.
This isn’t just authoritarianism. It’s emotional abuse. It’s the endless cycle of chaos and denial, waking up each day wondering what new line will be crossed, what new horror we’ll be told to accept, which neighbor will turn on us next.
It’s gaslighting on a national scale.
And the Republicans? Silent. Except for Rand Paul and Lisa Murkowski, two names in a sea of cowardice, who dared to ask for evidence before more people die. The bare minimum of oversight. The absolute floor of constitutional duty. And even they are the outliers.
I keep thinking about the families being torn apart by all of this. Not just the families lost at sea, but the ones here, in our neighborhoods, in our living rooms. In my own.
Last week, I was uninvited from Christmas. My whole family was. The reason? “Your politics.”
That’s what a family member said. As if caring whether children eat is politics. As if opposing extrajudicial killings is politics. As if believing in democracy is politics.
And here’s what breaks my heart: it’s almost always the MAGA faithful who cut off contact. The ones who scream about free speech, who drape themselves in the flag and call it freedom. They’ll post their loyalty to Trump, their theories, their rage. But try to respond? Try to offer truth, compassion, or context?
Conversation over. You’re blocked. You’re uninvited. You’re erased.
And we have to accept where the other side is right now and keep moving forward. I know I am not the only one in this situation. In fact, this is the second family member who has responded this way. It stung. Not because of being pushed out, but because this is a situation with no winners, only losers. You cannot love someone out of a cult. You can’t fact-check someone into clarity. All you can do is protect your own peace, and keep fighting for the country they gave up on.
I’ve watched friends lose parents to this madness. Parents who once taught them to be kind, to think critically, to care for others, now clapping for cruelty and calling it patriotism. I’ve heard from people whose children won’t speak to them anymore because they refuse to kneel to Trump. Marriages are ending. Friendships are shattering. Communities are splitting like wood under an axe.
People who chose Trump over family and over their neighbors. They chose a man who brags about killing over the people who loved them their whole lives.
And I wonder if they’ll ever understand what they’ve sacrificed. Not just relationships, but their own humanity. The part of them that once would have flinched and recoiled at anything that is happening.
So I sit here tonight as someone who understands the price we are paying by choosing sides. By saying this is not ok and who isn’t staying silent. Because we’ve been here before and this is our chance to make sure this is the last time.
During the Civil War, families split over what they called politics, but it was really about whether humans could own other humans. Whether wealth justified cruelty. Whether some people’s children mattered more than others.
Those families eventually found their way back to each other. Mostly through silence. Through not talking about it. Through pretending the horror hadn’t happened.
But maybe that’s why this hurts so deeply, because America was never taught to think collectively. We’ve always had an individualism problem. Always.
We’ve been trained to ask, “What’s best for me?” But the question now is, “What’s best for us?”
Because survival, real, lasting survival, depends on solidarity. It depends on standing together. Even when they try to tear us apart. And maybe this time if and when we find each other again, we can have the conversation that didn’t happen before. Maybe we can start to think about everyone, not just ourselves. Maybe we can have the hard conversation that are owed to past generations that can finally heal a broken country and safeguard us from the next authoritarian or dictator or fascist regime wanna be.
Maybe we have to go backwards before we can truly move forward. And when this chapter is over, and the next president works towards cleaning up this mess, we must demand that they tear down whatever is standing of Trump’s monument to himself, the ballroom, and restore the East Wing to the best of their ability. Future monsters need to know that it is our house and “we the people” will never allow this to happen again.
I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather