Most animals respond to carrots and sticks. If an act has high rewards and few risks, they’ll engage in it. Conversely, if it’s high risk and low reward, they’ll avoid it. This is true when raising children or training dogs, and it’s also true for adult human beings. Everyone understands it, and it tells you a lot about the American political parties when you consider how they allocate risks and rewards.
Democrats reward criminal behavior that harms Americans. They do this by minimizing consequences, thereby optimizing ill-gotten gains.
Every criminal is given a root cause excuse and set free. Likewise, every illegal alien also gets a root cause excuse (minorities’ home countries aren’t nice places to live—and contemplate the racism in that statement), so they should be able to move here at will and get welfare. For Democrats, drug cartels exist at the perfect overlap on the Venn diagram showing criminal acts and illegal aliens.
Republicans, when they’re not handcuffed by Democrat shibboleths, believe that criminal behavior should be punished. They don’t want cash bail for violent criminals or recidivists. They want long sentences for criminals...long enough, and without easy parole, to stop the revolving door that sees dangerous people constantly returned to the streets. They understand the power of disincentives.
Trump also understands this power. That’s why he’s decided to stop playing cute with foreign invaders heading to the U.S. on the high seas (otherwise known as an enemy invasion). As long as they’re in open waters, not American waters, they don’t get the benefit of due process. Instead, they get treated like enemy combatants; that is, they get killed.
Yesterday, Trump announced for the third time on Truth Social that the United States military had blown a narcoterrorist boat out of the water (click on the Truth Social embed to see the accompanying video):
On my Orders, the Secretary of War ordered a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel affiliated with a Designated Terrorist Organization conducting narcotrafficking in the USSOUTHCOM area of responsibility. Intelligence confirmed the vessel was trafficking illicit narcotics, and was transiting along a known narcotrafficking passage enroute to poison Americans. The strike killed 3 male narcoterrorists aboard the vessel, which was in international waters. No U.S. Forces were harmed in this strike. STOP SELLING FENTANYL, NARCOTICS, AND ILLEGAL DRUGS IN AMERICA, AND COMMITTING VIOLENCE AND TERRORISM AGAINST AMERICANS!!!
He's absolutely right: When foreigners are heading on the high seas for American shores carrying a cargo intended to commit slow-motion mass murder, that is an act of war and one appropriately addressed by the Department of War.
With every narcoterrorist boat that Trump reduces to splinters and ashes, he raises the cost of sending deadly drugs to America. Eventually, the cartels, which may operate as frontline troops for enemy nations such as Venezuela and China, but are actually in it for the money, will decide that the risk is not worth the reward. With their foot soldiers and products lying at the bottom of the ocean, their potential profits just won’t be enough to justify the downsides of doing business in the Trump era.