When the Situation Room becomes a mob social club, the only difference between a war crime and a pardon is who you know.
The water in the Caribbean is warm, blue, and apparently lawless. If you look closely enough at the recent reports coming out of the Pentagon, you can see the stain spreading. It is not an oil slick or an algae bloom. It is the residue of a governance style that has finally dropped the pretense of statecraft and fully embraced the logic of the gangland enforcer. We are no longer watching a presidency; we are watching a season of The Sopranos where the budget includes aircraft carriers and the Bada Bing is the Department of Justice. The latest tableau of horror, stitched together from the Washington Post’s reporting and the frantic whispers of career officials, paints a picture of an administration that has turned the machinery of the state into a weapon for its friends and a meat grinder for everyone else.
It starts, as these things so often do, with a man who views lethal force as a branding exercise. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a man whose resume reads less like a statesman and more like a character sheet for a chaotic-evil Paladin in a D&D campaign, allegedly gave an order regarding a boat in the Caribbean on September 2. The directive was simple, brutal, and devoid of the nuance usually required when dealing with human life in international waters: “kill everybody.” It is the kind of line that gets a cheer at a rally or a nod in a chat room, but when translated into kinetic action by the most powerful military on earth, it becomes a massacre.
The Washington Post reports that this was not just a strike to disable a vessel. It was an erasure. After the initial hit left the boat crippled and the people aboard—branded “narco-terrorists” by a PR machine working overtime—struggling in the water, a second strike was reportedly launched. This follow-up was not for safety. It was not for containment. It was, according to officials cited in the probe, to finish off the survivors. Eleven people were aboard. Most are dead. The “double tap” is a tactic usually reserved for terrorists in a cave or assassins in a video game, yet here it is, deployed against a shipwrecked crew in our own hemisphere, authorized by a Secretary who treats the Geneva Conventions like a Terms of Service agreement that nobody reads.
But to view this atrocity in isolation is to miss the point. The slaughter in the Caribbean is not a glitch. It is a feature. It is the violent enforcement arm of a worldview that sees the law not as a set of rules to be followed, but as a territory to be conquered. While Hegseth plays the role of the vainglorious executioner, flexing for the cameras and turning the Department of Defense into a content house for “America First” violence, the President is busy working the other side of the equation.
Enter Juan Orlando Hernández. The former President of Honduras is currently a convicted felon in the United States, found guilty of massive drug trafficking and corruption. He is the very definition of a “narco-terrorist,” the exact kind of “bad hombre” that Trump spent years railing against. He turned his country into a cocaine superhighway, poisoned his own people, and used the proceeds to buy power. By every metric of the “law and order” rhetoric the GOP espouses, he should be rotting in a federal supermax until the end of time.
Instead, he is getting a pardon.
Donald Trump’s decision to pardon Hernández is the missing puzzle piece that makes the picture clear. It is the emblematic payoff that turns geopolitical brutality into transactional mercy. If you are a nameless person on a boat in the Caribbean, suspected of smuggling, you get a Hellfire missile to the face while you are treading water. If you are a powerful autocrat who moved tons of cocaine but stayed loyal to the Big Boss, you get a get-out-of-jail-free card. The distinction is not guilt or innocence. The distinction is patronage.
This is the “gang of criminals” theory that The Bulwark and other observers have been screaming about, finally made manifest in high definition. The administration is not a government in the traditional sense. It is a protection racket. It operates on the ancient feudal code: protection for the loyal, violence for the outsider, and total impunity for the leadership. The pardon of a foreign drug lord is not an act of mercy. It is a signal. It tells every other corrupt leader, every other crony, every other potential accomplice that the law does not matter. Loyalty matters. If you kiss the ring, you can move the product.
We are witnessing the interlocking of these scandals into a coherent pattern of law-scorning governance. The sex-crime coverups that haunt the administration’s periphery are part of the same fabric. The blanket pardons for insurrectionists and fraudsters are part of the same fabric. The extrajudicial violence abroad is part of the same fabric. It is all one thing. It is the privatization of the state. The Department of Justice, the Department of Defense, the intelligence agencies—they are being stripped of their institutional mandates and repurposed as tools for the family business.
The optics of this are so absurd they defy satire, yet we must look at them. We have a Secretary of Defense who is lauded on social media as “based” for allegedly ordering the execution of survivors, a move that legal scholars warn is a textbook war crime. We have a President tweeting mixed messages about the strike while simultaneously signing the release papers for a drug kingpin. We have GOP majorities in Congress nodding along, their spines having long since dissolved into a puddle of partisan gelatin. They hold hearings on “wokeism” in the military while the military is busy shooting shipwrecked people. They scream about the “weaponization of government” while the President uses the pardon power to weaponize impunity.
The disconnect is meant to be disorienting. It is designed to make you feel like you are losing your mind. How can they claim to be tough on drugs while freeing a drug lord? How can they claim to be the party of law while violating international maritime law? The answer is that they don’t care about consistency. They care about power. Consistency is a hobgoblin of little minds and democracies. In an authoritarian system, the ability to contradict yourself and still be obeyed is the ultimate flex.
The “narco-terrorist” label applied to the victims of the Caribbean strike is the linguistic grease that makes the machine run. It is a magic word. Once you say it, the rights of the accused evaporate. The need for evidence vanishes. The prohibition against shooting survivors in the water disappears. It de-humanizes the targets, turning them into 8-bit enemies that can be deleted without conscience. But the Hernandez pardon exposes the lie. If they really cared about narco-terrorism, Hernandez would be the ultimate target. He is the CEO of the industry. But he is their narco-terrorist, so he walks. The people on the boat were nobody’s asset, so they sank.
This is the moral arithmetic of the regime. It is a calculus that values a human life at exactly zero unless that life can be leveraged for political gain. The “toughness” they project is performative. It is costume drama. Hegseth wearing his tactical gear and talking tough is cosplay. It is an aesthetic choice, not a strategic one. Real strength involves restraint. Real strength involves adherence to the law even when it is inconvenient. What we are seeing is the weakness of the bully who kicks the person who is already down because it makes him feel big.
The practical stakes of this scorched-earth approach are terrifying. We are looking at significant legal exposure for U.S. personnel. The JAGs and the career lawyers at the Pentagon are likely vomiting in wastebaskets right now, knowing that the International Criminal Court is taking notes. They know that “I was following orders” is not a defense that holds up well in The Hague, especially when the order was “kill everybody.” We are creating a generation of service members who are being taught that the rules of engagement are suggestions and that mercy is for suckers. That is a spiritual injury to the armed forces that will take decades to heal.
The damage to U.S. credibility is total. How do we lecture other nations on human rights? How do we condemn Russian atrocities in Ukraine? How do we stand up for the rule of law in the South China Sea? We don’t. We can’t. We have ceded the high ground. We are down in the mud with the dictators and the warlords, playing by their rules. The diplomatic fallout in the region will be severe. Latin American governments are watching us kill their citizens in the water and free their corrupt oppressors. They are taking note. They are realizing that the United States is not a partner; it is a predator.
And what of the oversight? The congressional committees that are supposed to check this power are currently run by the accomplices. They will hold show hearings, perhaps. They will ask polite questions. They might even issue a subpoena or two that will be ignored. But they will not bite. They cannot bite. To hold the administration accountable would be to indict themselves. They have bought the ticket, and now they have to take the ride, even if the ride ends in a tribunal.
The terrifying normalization of this political culture is the real danger. We are getting used to it. We are scrolling past the headline about the “second strike” to get to the sports scores. We are shrugging at the pardon of a drug lord because, well, that’s just Trump being Trump. This numbness is the death of the republic. When we stop being shocked by the grotesque, we have accepted it. We have agreed to live in the world they have built.
This administration treats state power as a grift. From the dodgy security waivers for cronies like Dan Bongino to the cosplay-tactical stunts in Provo, it is all a hustle. It is about moving money and influence from the public trust into private hands. The violence is just the enforcement mechanism for the grift. It keeps the critics quiet. It keeps the border porous for the things they want (favors, money) and closed for the things they don’t (migrants, accountability).
The financial self-dealing is the quiet bass line thumping underneath the noise of the scandals. While we argue about the morality of the boat strike, someone is getting a contract. While we debate the Hernandez pardon, a deal is being cut for a hotel or a golf course. The chaos is the cover. It creates a fog of war that allows the looting to continue uninterrupted.
And the weaponization of the law? That is the most cynical joke of all. They claim the Department of Justice was weaponized against them, so they must weaponize it back. It is a childish, dangerous logic. It destroys the very concept of neutral justice. The law becomes a club to beat your enemies and a shield to protect your friends. If you are on the team, you get a pardon. If you are not, you get an investigation. Or a missile.
We are watching the transformation of a constitutional republic into a mafia state. It is not happening in the shadows anymore. It is happening on prime time. It is happening in press briefings where the Press Secretary smiles and lies about the body count. It is happening on Truth Social where the President brags about freeing a criminal. It is happening in the waters of the Caribbean where the sharks are feeding on the consequences of our policy.
The “national strength” they celebrate is a hollow shell. It is the strength of a drunk swinging a broken bottle in a bar fight. It is dangerous, yes. It is lethal, absolutely. But it is not strong. It is fragile and frantic and pathetic. It relies on fear because it cannot command respect. It relies on violence because it has no arguments. It relies on pardons because it cannot withstand justice.
The looming question of who will be held responsible if orders to kill survivors are proven is one that haunts the corridors of the Pentagon. But in this administration, responsibility is a concept for the little people. The leaders do not take responsibility; they take credit. If the strike is popular, they ordered it. If it turns into a war crime, it was a rogue operator. If the pardon backfires, it was a compassionate gesture. They are Teflon warlords, sliding through the wreckage they create, leaving the cleanup to the historians.
But history is watching. The receipts are being stacked. The text messages, the flight logs, the witness testimony—it is all being gathered. The administration may think they can pardon their way out of this, that they can bomb their way to legitimacy, but the truth has a nasty habit of floating to the surface. Like the debris from that boat in the Caribbean, it refuses to stay submerged.
We are left with a tableau that is equal parts tragedy and farce. A Secretary of Defense playing soldier. A President playing Godfather. A Congress playing dumb. And a public that is being asked to applaud the performance while the theatre burns down around them.
The “second strike” on the survivors is the perfect metaphor for this entire era. First, they break the institutions. That is the initial strike. They shatter the norms, disable the checks and balances, leave the democracy listing in the water. And then, when we are struggling to stay afloat, when we are gasping for air and reaching for a lifeline, they come back around for the finish. They don’t want to just defeat the opposition; they want to extinguish it. They want to make sure there are no survivors to tell the tale.
But we are still swimming. We are still taking notes. We are still watching the water. And we know exactly what we are seeing. We are seeing a gang of criminals who have stolen the keys to the aircraft carrier, and they are drunk on power and cheap wine. They think they are the masters of the universe. They think the law is for other people.
They are wrong. The law is patient. The law is slow. But the law, like the tide, eventually comes in. And when it does, all the pardons in the world won’t be enough to stop the flood.
Receipt Time
The bill for this carnival of corruption is not coming; it is here. We are paying it every time a foreign leader laughs at our diplomats. We are paying it every time a soldier questions whether their orders are legal. We are paying it with the erosion of our soul. The receipt is long, bloody, and printed on the back of a pardon for a drug lord. It lists the cost of every “double tap,” every “kill everybody” order, every lie told from the podium. The total is the loss of the United States as a nation of laws. The payment method is our collective silence. And the tip? The tip is the realization that the people running the country don’t just think they are above the law; they think they are the law. And until we prove them wrong, they are right.