The Trump administration used a drone strike to eliminate what it says was a Venezuelan boat filled with narcotics last week. When Vice President J.D. Vance applauded the operation as the “highest and best use of our military,” Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., compared the strike to a lynching.
After a left-wing social media reply guy calling the strike a “war crime,” Vance replied back, “I don’t give a sh-t what you call it,” which triggered Paul’s bizarre comparison to lynch mobs in the Jim Crow South.
“JD ‘I don’t give a sh-t’ Vance says killing people he accuses of a crime is the ‘highest and best use of the military,'” Paul said. “Did he ever read To Kill a Mockingbird? Did he ever wonder what might happen if the accused were immediately executed without trial or representation?? What a despicable and thoughtless sentiment it is to glorify killing someone without a trial.”
Narcotics pouring across the southern border kill tens of thousands of Americans each year and enrich international terrorist cartels. President Trump has been treating cartel proliferation of such activity within the American homeland as a war, albeit yet another war undeclared by Congress. The strike is one of the very few recent examples of the U.S. military directly protecting Americans at home.
Yet in 2015, when former President Barack Obama approved a drone strike in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region that reportedly accidentally killed two American hostages in addition to foreign combatants during another congressionally unauthorized war, Paul defended Obama.
“The world is so partisan, I tend not to want to blame the President for the loss of life here. I think he was trying to do the right thing,” he said on Fox and Friends at the time. “These people were in a war zone and probably got what was coming to them – the captors. Unfortunately some innocent people also died.”
Paul’s position on Obama’s drone strike drew praise from prominent warmonger Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.
A source close to Vance said it was strange Paul was willing to defend Obama when he droned Americans in the Middle East, but wouldn’t defend a strike against foreign terrorists close to America’s shores: “The vice president believes in the Trump doctrine and using overwhelming force to protect core American interests and save American lives.”
Trump said the Sept. 2 strike “resulted in 11 terrorists killed in action. No U.S. Forces were harmed in this strike,” and the boat had “a lot of drugs.” According to Trump, the U.S. military identified the boat’s crew as members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang the U.S. government designated a terrorist organization earlier this year.
The strike took place after Trump increased the number of U.S. warships in the Caribbean to quell threats from Latin American cartels.
Paul’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Breccan F. Thies is the White House correspondent for The Federalist. He previously covered education and culture issues for the Washington Examiner and Breitbart News. He holds a degree from the University of Virginia and is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. You can follow him on X: @BreccanFThies.