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This is the third in a series of articles, “Try, Try Again?,” drawn from my new book—Great and Dangerous Offences: The Case for (and Against) Impeaching Trump a Third Time—due out in early 2027.

At the beginning of his national political career, Donald Trump famously said that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue in New York and not lose political support. In her dissent from the 2024 Supreme Court opinion granting Trump and his presidential successors unprecedented immunity for crimes committed while in office, Justice Sonia Sotomayor observed incredulously that should a president order “the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival,” he would nonetheless be “immune” from criminal prosecution. The first statement may remain an accurate description of the devotion of Trump’s most ardent admirers, and the second, incredibly, may now be an accurate statement of the law. Nonetheless, a president can still be impeached and removed for commanding an unlawful killing, as Trump has done in authorizing lethal, and illegal, strikes on boats merely suspected of carrying drugs. Murder is a “high crime.”

In the fall of 2025, President Donald Trump authorized a series of military attacks on boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific alleged to be smuggling drugs. The first occurred on Sept. 2, 2025. The Pentagon called this and later attacks “kinetic strikes,” a euphemism for blowing up the boats and everything and everyone in them with bombs or missiles fired from aircraft, drones, or other U.S. military platforms. In neither this first attack nor in the many others that followed did U.S. authorities attempt to stop the boats, inspect their contents, or arrest and prosecute the supposed drug traffickers aboard them. In one notorious instance, several members of a boat’s crew survived the initial explosion and were clinging to the wreckage, but at the direct order of Navy Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley, the military returned to the scene and killed them. As of Sept. 19 of this year, U.S. forces had hit 70 vessels and killed 234 people.

I have personal experience of anti–drug smuggling efforts in the Caribbean. For more than six years, I was an assistant U.S. attorney in Miami. I prosecuted innumerable cases involving most of the ways human ingenuity can devise to move narcotics from South and Central America to the continental United States, including the most direct one—loading drugs on “go fast” boats and speeding across the ocean. When I first saw the black-and-white videos of Trump’s boat attacks, I recognized them immediately. In my days prosecuting drug smugglers, I had watched essentially the same grainy images shot by infrared cameras mounted on military or customs aircraft. With one key difference. Our videos were evidence. They ended with a capture, with crew members arrested, and with a prosecution in a court of law. Trump’s videos, gleefully released by his ghoulish Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, end in a flash of light and either instant death or a slower, but usually no less fatal, struggle with the enveloping ocean. They are official snuff films.

What makes them even worse, if that’s possible, is that I never saw the infrared films of aerial surveillance unless the boat had been stopped and drugs found, making clear that the occupants were committing a crime. Because Trump’s uniformed henchmen........

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