patrick.net

It is a well-known fact that I rank corporate media’s journalistic ethics somewhere down below South American cartel bosses, Chucky the Doll, and pond scum (but just above public health experts and timeshare salesmen). An ideal example appeared in yesterday’s New York Times, scribbled below the headline “Trump Says He Will Not Seek Authorization for Cartel Strikes.” Did the editors decorate the story with, oh, I don’t know, a cartel strike?

The President held a dramatic White House press conference yesterday on law enforcement. One particularly saucy Trumpism that dropped during the proceedings seemed bound to make the news, and I fully expected to see it draped in outrage and splashed across the tops of the big platforms’ websites. But shockingly, it was AWOL. After a diligent search, I finally found it hidden beneath that mind-numbing and uninformative headline.

You tell me. Here was the exchange (0:27): https://x.com/CollinRugg/status/1981458551165112541

REPORTER: Mr. President, if you are declaring war against these cartels, and Congress is likely to approve of that process, why not just ask for a declaration of war?

PRESIDENT: I don’t think we’re going to necessarily ask for a declaration of war. I think we are going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. OK? We are going to kill them. You know? They are going to be, like, dead. Next question.

As soon as I heard it, I also thought I could hear the liberal outrage machine spinning up to full strength. The headlines practically write themselves: Deranged President Says ‘We Are Going to Kill People.’ Or, Trump Crowns Himself With Power of Life and Death. Or, We Hate President Trump and You Should, Too.

But instead, the liberal outrage machine spun back down again. They aren’t taking the bait. Instead, the Times recognized an 80/20 issue it was on the wrong side of (again), and just excreted a flabbergasted jeremiad against “unconstitutional” drug-runner destruction. You’d think a self-respecting newspaper would have taken a crack at answering the reporter’s question, to contradict Trump, but no.

The Times has no self-respect.

So let us answer the question ourselves, once and for all: does President Trump need a Congressional Declaration of War before he can unalive the cartels?

The Constitution’s first Article gives Congress the awesome power to declare war. But Article II gives the president full control of the U.S. military. He doesn’t just control the ships, he also controls the missiles, the sailors, and the buttons that launch them. The tension between those two powers —the power to declare war versus the power to control the military— steers us to the present moment.

As any American knows who’s paid the slightest attention to current events between cueing in the coffeeshop drive-thru and trying to avoid paying attention to current events, the US military has been an extremely busy branch of the government. So busy, in fact, that Trump successfully ran for office on a promise to make it less busy. ...

But Congress has only formally declared war five times: the War of 1812, the Mexican War (1848), the Spanish-American War (1898), World War I (1914), and World War II (1941). ...

How then can we explain all the other shooting and bombing that’s happened outside those five major conflicts where Congress stirred itself out of its whiskey-induced legislative coma and provided a formal declaration? Think about Vietnam, Korea, Cambodia, Iraq, Iran, Ukraine, Ethiopia, Kuwait, Yemen, etc., etc., and et cetera, none of which were “declared” wars.

As the Times surely knows —but most reporters probably don’t; I blame public schools— the uncontroversial mainstream view holds that the president may fire off an armed conflict without a Congressional declaration of war under three broad conditions: for ‘limited’ wars, for defensive wars, and whenever Congress provides any fig leaf of “authorization for use of military force” short of a formal declaration.

That second category —defensive wars— is the one that applies here. Over the years, it has been interpreted as the power to “repel sudden attacks” and “respond to imminent threats” against the United States, its forces, and its citizens, and its foreign-based interests (like Middle Eastern military bases or Caribbean cruise ships).

Without explicitly calling it a “defensive war,” President Trump still has consistently and clearly made a case for his hostilities against the cartels being a defensive war.

Yesterday, President Trump teased that the naval strikes were just the opening act. “The land is going to be next,” he promised. He directed War Secretary Hegseth to brief Congress —not ask them for permission— and said he expects Congress to agree anyway. “What are they going to do? Say, ‘Gee, we don’t want to stop drugs pouring in?’” President Trump said. “They’re killing 300,000 people a year.”

(Note from Patrick: that's five times the total US losses in the Vietnam War, every year.)

Trump has properly framed the cartel conflict as a defensive war. It’s hard to argue with— well-funded criminal foreign actors are illegally crossing our borders with stuff that kills Americans. Yesterday, and not accidentally, Hegseth said, “Every boat we strike is 25,000 Americans whose lives were saved because of the drugs that were headed in our direction.”

In other words, Trump is defending the country. Trump doesn’t need a declaration of war or even a Congressional authorization to conduct a defensive war. It’s that simple.

But Trump’s “we’ll just kill them” comment was the least newsworthy part of the press conference. During the public event, Trump’s team —Pam Bondi, Tulsi Gabbard, Kristi Noem, and Kash Patel— delivered reports about their wildly successful efforts to crack down on crime, especially cartel-related crimes. The day’s most astonishing crime-fighting anecdote came from Tulsi Gabbard, who described a story reported last month in the New York Post under the headline, “Female cartel member ‘La Diabla’ busted for running horrific baby-trafficking, organ-harvesting rings.”

https://nypost.com/2025/09/25/world-news/la-diabla-martha-aguilar-arrested-for-alleged-baby-trafficking-organ-harvesting-rings/

(Martha Alicia Mendez Aguilar, a member of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel in Mexico whose nickname translates as “She-Devil,” allegedly lured poor, pregnant women to remote locations where she would perform illegal C-section operations — often killing the women, CBS News reported. She would then harvest the dead mothers’ organs and sell their newborns to US couples for up to 250,000 Mexican pesos, or roughly $14,000, according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.)

For some reason, the Times was not interested in La Diabla’s arrest, despite all the salacious details of pure evil. You know why.