By Asawin Suebsaeng & Team Zeteo
Photos: YouTube Screenshots
By the summer of 2024, I had grown convinced that if Donald Trump managed to electorally vanquish Kamala Harris, his new administration would turn the US government, and therefore the nation, into the “blood orgy scene from ‘Event Horizon,’ if only every cannibal space-demon in that scene were played by the villain from ‘Happy Gilmore.’” This prognosis was based only on what he had done in his first presidency, and what he was vowing to do in his second. We are less than a year into the second Trump era, and I’d argue that my fears weren’t just realized. They were surpassed on every meaningful level, given how much this administration is an authoritarian personality cult buttressed by a grinning culture of mass death and degradation, as the president keeps telling us that up is down and hate equals “love.”
The latest of many examples this year came with a Washington Post story describing the directive issued by Trump’s defense secretary Pete Hegseth. “Hegseth order on first Caribbean boat strike, officials say: Kill them all,” the headline reads, paraphrasing what thenewspaperreports was a “spoken directive” from Hegseth, with a reduced paper trail. One of the unnamed sources simply told the Post: “The order was to kill everybody.” The incident was the first in what is now a lawless killing spree tied to Team Trump’s broader campaign for regime change and possible war on Venezuelan soil.
According to the Post, the commander overseeing the attack on the boat – which was supposedly carrying drug smugglers – ordered a second strike to eliminate two men who had survived and were clinging to the wreckage. While Trump’s boat bombing campaign is almost certainly illegal, attacking the two men in the water represents a possible war crime, because they were given no quarter, according to the paper. (It is inherently bizarre to talk about violent war crimes when there isn’t even a war going on in the Caribbean Sea, but that is another topic for another day.)
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The impact from the Post article was quickly felt in Washington, with some top GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill joining Democratic colleagues in demanding investigations and answers. A significant number of legal experts in the field warn that what the Trump administration is reportedly doing is tantamount to murder, stretching the already atrocious frameworks of the so-called global “War on Terror” to an egregious breaking point. Some of these outraged observers have couched their horror in stressing that the double-tap strike and order are illegal, “if true” – an interesting choice of words given how Trump’s so-called “Secretary of War” emphatically did not deny the Post’s reporting in his initial public statement, and given how frequently senior Trump officials laugh off criticism that they don’t know whom they’re killing as they bomb these supposed “drug smugglers” and “narco-terrorists.”
Over the long Thanksgiving weekend, Trump – as if to further clarify his murderous intentions – blurted out on his social media website: “please consider THE AIRSPACE ABOVE AND SURROUNDING VENEZUELA TO BE CLOSED IN ITS ENTIRETY.” At the time, US officials insisted to reporters, including at Reuters and here at Zeteo, that they were unaware of any US military operation to accomplish this hostile action. “What the fuck are you talking about?” a senior US official – who would be in a position to know about such operations – told me, moments after I described the commander-in-chief’s then-fresh online post.
Some of this would be funny, were the stakes not so unbelievably high. A bumbling, clearly mentally desiccated American president – who just so happens to be the former host of NBC’s terrible game show ‘Celebrity Apprentice’ – cannot help himself from barfing out bloodlusting nonsense on his poorly reviewed Twitter-clone, to the point that he’s doing the Michael Scott “I Declare Bankruptcy” bit, except it’s for threatening a war.
One reason none of this is particularly funny is because “Kill Them All” isn’t just a paraphrase of a Pentagon order – it is a perfect summation of so many of Trump’s current policies at home and abroad. And the long-term ramifications, not to mention the shorter-term ones, from this are going to be colossal, both in predictable and completely unexpected ways.
Domestically, the Trump administration and the ruling party are willing to let millions upon millions of people starve or get sicker, especially if he can score an obnoxious political point out of it. Trump is following through on his 2024 campaign promise to leave you to die and suffer in emergency scenarios, if local political leaders don’t give him what he wants. If your city or state pisses him off, Trump has spent months sending armed troops to punish and humiliate you. On top of that, he’s deploying his masked, militarized secret police across the country, and he doesn’t seem to care how many civilians are being hurt or shot in the process. Trump’s top health official, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is waging a nonstop effort to institutionalize junk science and anti-vaccine hysteria that has grown so deranged that even multiple former senior Trump officials argue he’s likely going to get a lot of Americans needlessly killed. The president seeks to expand the death penalty and privately yearns for mass executions and modern gallows. And he so often endorses the slaughter of fellow Americans he doesn’t like, including elected Democrats, that it has become as routine in our political culture as discussions of tax hikes.
(The above is, unfortunately, a woefully incomplete list.)
And as I reported for Rolling Stone last year, when Trump was president the first time, he would slam his fist on the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, and yell about suspected street criminals in the United States: “Fucking kill them all,” Trump would demand. “You just got to kill these people … Other countries do it all the time.”
Today, it is the defining public policy of an entire political party and its movement.
That was during his first term, when “Fucking Kill Them All” was largely his violent fantasy – a bleakly quixotic goal.
