Democrats After Trump for the Ultimate Crime: Capturing a Narco-Terrorist
Like a summer cold that endlessly lingers, attacks on President Donald Trump persist, regardless of how righteous his initiatives, how positive his results, or how obvious progressive hypocrisy condones those same actions by anyone not named Trump.
The latest example of such double standards is the president’s military response to narco-terrorism, which includes ending the criminal regime of Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela and ordering drone strikes on drug smuggling boats in the Caribbean. At times, these strikes involve more than one salvo, the so-called double tap, to eliminate not only drugs but their traffickers.
But a “tap” of another kind is a fault-finding maneuver to avoid a problem by “dancing” away from its cause, its solution, or any responsibility for its existence. And such a pastime has become an all-too-common dodge among Democrats.
That is, instead of viewing the President’s actions as justifiably protecting Americans from illicit drugs, progressives view him as a merciless war criminal killing “defenseless” drug traffickers. And equally absurd, they have framed Trump’s extradition of Maduro to the United States as an act of war and a violation of the Constitution.
For tap-dancing liberals bereft of ideas and concerned about Trump’s successes, it doesn’t much matter that their “grasping for straws” outrage over his limited military actions was virtually nonexistent when Barack Obama ordered far more lethal responses to terrorism.
Although the use of drones against terrorists began during the George W. Bush administration, Obama greatly expanded their use for targeted killings of high-value al-Qaeda and Taliban terrorists in Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Somalia.
In fact, such operations became a major aspect of his foreign policy, with “Counterterrorism-in-Chief” Obama personally involved in approving targets some described as “kill lists.” As such, it has been estimated that there were 10 times as many air strikes in the war on terror during the Obama presidency as under his predecessor, President Bush, and far more than under Trump.
And though insisting that those more than 500 Obama-era drone strikes were “exceptionally surgical and precise,” a 2013 attack in Yemen killed 12 civilians at a wedding, and two years later, a bungled strike in Afghanistan sent 24 patients from their hospital beds to the morgue.
Overall, up to 3,800 people were killed in Obama-ordered drone strikes, including at least 324 civilians. Numerous human rights groups criticized those figures, yet most Democrats ignored, discredited, or even justified them.
Comparatively speaking, as of mid-December, it is estimated that during Trump’s narco-terrorism campaign in the Caribbean, fewer than 100 drug smugglers have been killed, all at sea and far from the land-based collateral deaths occurring during the Obama administration.
But beyond such numbers, Democrats are slower to recognize illicit drug use as an enormous public health crisis than to fault Trump for saving lives by killing those selling poison for profit.
A small sampling of such progressive criticisms focuses not only on drone strikes against narco-smugglers in general, but also on a September double-tap killing of two smugglers off the coast of Venezuela in particular.
Instead of expressing outrage over the tens of thousands of drug-related American deaths, progressives sympathetically focused on those two drug traffickers, whom they described as “in clear distress” and “floating helplessly in the water.”
Predictably, Democrats, seeking compassion for the “incapacitated” victims killed in that follow-up strike, labeled the action illegal, a war crime, and a form of extrajudicial killing. However, such hyperbole conveniently overlooks hundreds of examples of presidents using lethal military force to protect Americans.
Moreover, the progressive claim that Trump violated the Constitution by capturing Maduro because only Congress can declare war is an equally egregious tap dance, since his apprehension is hardly an occupying conflict against a criminal enterprise masquerading as a responsible nation.
Furthermore, accused by the longtime head of Venezuela’s intelligence of heading a narco-terrorism cartel, Maduro’s arrest was never an act of war. It was a well-deserved arrest, plain and simple. And besides, many Democrats criticized Trump during his first term for not removing Maduro, and now, when he does, they are critical of that as well.
Capturing him was an extremely limited military operation that overthrew a narco-dictator harming Americans, thereby fulfilling the president’s most sacred responsibility to protect our nation. And yet amazingly, many of those same progressives marching in the No Kings protests against “fascist” Trump have vilified him for removing fascist Maduro, killing countless Americans.
However, Democrats’ extralegal claims against the president are made even more ridiculous by the fact that in 2020, the Department of Justice already indicted Maduro for narco-terrorism, money laundering, and cocaine trafficking. What is more, 10 days before Biden left office in 2025, his administration upped an earlier bounty on the despot’s arrest or conviction to $25 million.
Even so, many Democrats still maintain that killing or even capturing narco-terrorists killing Americans is itself a criminal act.
But what progressives don’t realize is that linking the first action to the second has nothing to do with any rationally inspired moral equivalency. That flawed association rests on one thing smoldering in plain sight. And more than anything else, that is their media-fueled tap-dancing hatred of anything and everything Trump.
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