President Donald Trump claimed that the United States military acted out of “self-defense” against an “imminent threat” last week by striking a vessel it claimed was carrying drugs. So why was the boat turning around?

The New York Times spoke Wednesday with officials briefed on the strike who said that the administration’s public statements, and a less than 30-second video of the boat exploding, only gave an abridged version of the deadly incident. 

Officials said that the boat began to turn around, likely because it had spotted the military aircraft above. The video Trump shared also does not show that the vessel was struck multiple times after it was disabled, before it eventually sank.  

Retired top military lawyers argued that these revelations severely undermine the administration’s defense of its extrajudicial attack, that the military acted in “self-defense.” 

“If someone is retreating, where’s the ‘imminent threat’ then?” Rear Admiral Donald Guter, a retired top judge advocate general for the Navy from 2000 to 2002, told the Times. “Where’s the ‘self-defense’? They are gone if they ever existed—which I don’t think they did.”

“I would be interested if they could come up for any legal basis for what they did,” said Rear Admiral James E. McPherson, who served as the top judge advocate general for the Navy from 2004 to 2006 and later held prominent civilian military roles in the Trump administration. “If, in fact, you can fashion a legal argument that says these people were getting ready to attack the U.S. through the introduction of cocaine or whatever, if they turned back, then that threat has gone away.”

A White House spokesperson did not directly respond to questions about the boat’s maneuvers, and repeated the line that Trump had “acted in line with the laws of armed conflict to protect our country” from “evil narco terrorists trying to poison our homeland.”

Senator Rand Paul revealed to The Intercept Tuesday that the deadly strike had been the work of drones, and a blatant violation of the rules of engagement. 

“The recent drone attack on a small speedboat over 2,000 miles from our shore without identification of the occupants or the content of the boat is in no way part of a declared war and defies our longstanding Coast Guard rules of engagement which include: warnings to halt, non-lethal force to capture, and ultimately lethal force in self-defense or in cases of resistance,” Paul said. 

Missing details continue to cast doubt on the Trump administration’s narrative. Some officials at the Department of Defense privately expressed concerns that the government had changed details of its story about the deadly strike, which is especially worrying considering that the government has offered no evidence to support its claim that the individuals on the boat were in fact drug traffickers, or that they were en route to the United States.

We know almost nothing about the shooter who killed conservative activist Charlie Kirk—yet President Donald Trump delivered an address Wednesday evening blaming the “radical left” and their rhetoric for political violence.

According to the president, Wednesday’s shooting, which was swiftly condemned by prominent Democrats, was the result of the left “demonizing those with whom you disagree day after day, year after year in the most hateful and despicable way possible.”

Trump went on: “For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.”

The president promised to hunt down those he deems responsible for the violence on Wednesday and other violent acts, “including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country.”

Trump continued, citing examples of “radical left political violence.” He mentioned the attempt on his life in July 2024, the assassination of the UnitedHealthcare CEO, attacks on ICE agents, and the 2017 mass shooting at a congressional baseball game.

He notably failed to mention acts of political violence perpetrated by right wingers against the left—e.g., the June shootings of two Minnesota Democratic lawmakers and their spouses, which killed State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband; the 2022 attack on Paul Pelosi, in an attempted kidnapping of Nancy Pelosi (which Trump mocked); the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot, stoked by Trump; and the thwarted kidnapping of Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic governor of Michigan.

Despite his condemnation of “demonizing” rhetoric, Trump has done more than perhaps any other singular figure to stoke partisan tensions.

In 2024, Trump repeatedly called Kamala Harris a “fascist.” In May 2024, he said Biden had turned America into “a fascist state.” In November 2023, he vowed to “root out the Communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” And back in 2020, he raised the specter of “left-wing fascism” gripping the Democratic Party, saying, “Fascists! They are fascists. Some of them, not all of them. But some of them.”

As The New York Times observed in September 2024, he has also “long favored the language of violence in his political discourse.”

In short, the president is no stranger to vilifying those with whom he disagrees, giving his words Wednesday a hollow ring.

On Wednesday, a Democratic representative brought up multiple ways in which her congressional colleagues received the “gender-affirming care” they wanted to ban. It made MAGA Representative Nancy Mace so upset she started screaming.

Democrats and Republicans were arguing in Congress about amendments to the annual defense bill. Mace had added multiple anti-transgender amendments, including one that specifically removed gender-affirming care from the U.S. military’s health care coverage.

Mace has a long history of bigoted anti-trans rhetoric and legislation, and California Democratic Representative Sara Jacobs used her time on the floor to rebuke her, calling Mace out for her blatant hypocrisy without mentioning the representative by name.

“I would just like to point out that I think it’s very interesting that my colleague from South Carolina is so obsessed with the issue of trans people, using horrible slurs about them, when many........

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