MS NOW host Rachel Maddow claimed Tuesday that President Donald Trump was launching strikes on drug boats to start a war with Venezuela for using the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelans.
US military forces have launched several strikes against ships involved in drug smuggling since September 2, when troops sank a boat carrying 11 members of the Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua (TdA), which Trump declared a foreign terrorist organization on January 20, 2025. Maddow claimed the Trump administration was trying to “reverse engineer” the casus belli, saying “Deadline: The White House” host Nicolle Wallace’s pretext was drug trafficking. (RELATED: White House launches new campaign targeting ‘biased’ media and ‘fake news’ reporting)
“I don’t understand why we’re at war with Venezuela, and I’m not sure the administration has bothered to try to come up with anything even internally coherent in terms of explaining why Trump declared we’re at war with Venezuela,” Maddow said. “My feeling is that they wanted to use the Alien Enemies Act to deport people illegally, and to arrest and deport people from this country who were not actually subject to deportation.”
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“They decided that the Alien Enemies Act was a way to do that,” Maddow continued. “Then they realized that the Alien Enemies Act required war, so they declared war. Then they needed a casus belli, so they reverse-engineered a casus belli. Ostensibly, right now, the casus belli is to stop drug smuggling into the United States.”
While liberals claim that strikes on drug boats are illegal and war crimes, Democratic Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, one of six Democrats who have served in the military or intelligence agencies, appeared in a letter. video She urged members of the military and intelligence agencies to ignore Trump’s “illegal” orders She was unable to name an illegal order issued by Trump when pressed by “This Week” host Martha Raddatz during her Nov. 23 appearance.
“What are we doing there in the first place?” Madhu said. “Why do we go out on the water and kill people in outboard motor boats, some of which don’t even point toward the United States, let alone check for drugs on them, let alone — even if they did, if they were coming to the United States and they had the ability to get into the United States, and they were full of drugs, why couldn’t they be interdicted the way we do with the Coast Guard, where you go and take the drugs and then put those people on trial and investigate and then ‘trace the drugs back to their original source and then take care of them there?’
“It’s like they got themselves into a very incoherent and illegal position where they decided that the only real benefit they were getting out of all of this was that they were getting video game-style visuals to play on Fox News and put on TikTok, and they loved that,” Maddow continued. “So they have now placed this admiral, the commander of Southern Command, every senior officer in that command, and all the men and women who served there in a position of potentially being liable for murder or war crimes until the statute of limitations on those matters runs.” (RELATED: Barack Obama Really Wants You to Believe the Mainstream Media Gets It Right)
The Senate rejected a resolution rejecting strikes under the War Powers Act by a vote of 51 to 49 on November 13.
MS NOW hosts and guests routinely promoted claims that President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign colluded with the Russian government to defeat Clinton, and they repeatedly aired then-Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff of California, who frequently made claims about alleged collusion between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia, on the air when the network was known as MSNBC. The network was rebranded in November 2025 after it was spun off and separated from NBC.
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