President Trump has drawn a line that no other American leader has dared to etch: the United States, he declared, is engaged in an armed conflict with the drug cartels that poison our people.
They are not mere traffickers now, not in his eyes, but terrorist organizations — and their smugglers, his admin told Congress, are to be regarded as unlawful combatants.
The notice to lawmakers, obtained by The New York Times, confirmed what Trump himself has hinted at in speeches. It is not rhetoric. It is a formal designation that grants the commander in chief extraordinary wartime powers — powers that his supporters say are long overdue in a nation drowning in fentanyl.
Last month, U.S. military strikes in the Caribbean obliterated three smuggling boats, killing 17 men who, according to the administration, were ferrying cocaine and fentanyl into American waters. Trump had told Marines at Quantico: “If you try to poison our people, we will blow you out of existence. That’s the only language they really understand. That’s why you don’t see any more boats on the ocean.”
Trump just called out Nicolás Maduro’s drug trafficking regime…with the Venezuelan delegates sitting right in front of him, forced to listen.
Then he dropped the line that made the room go still:
“We will blow you out of existence.”
They did not like it one bit.
“We’ve… pic.twitter.com/yHMjP1bLgs
— Vigilant Fox 🦊 (@VigilantFox) September 23, 2025
The legal establishment fretted. Geoffrey S. Corn, a retired Army lawyer, warned that the cartels were not engaged in “hostilities” in the traditional sense, that this amounted to “an abuse.” “This is not stretching the envelope,” he said. “This is shredding it. This is tearing it apart.”
But the White House was unmoved. Anna Kelly, speaking for the administration, said in an email: “The president acted in line with the law of armed conflict to protect our country from those trying to bring deadly poison to our shores, and he is delivering on his promise to take on the cartels and eliminate these national security threats from murdering more Americans.”
The administration calls the strikes self-defense. It points to the grim toll, nearly 100,000 overdose deaths every year, and insists that war powers are justified when the battlefield is every American town.
Trump, in his blunt way, has turned the drug crisis into a national war footing. And in so doing, he has dared the country to see the cartels not as distant criminals but as enemies of the republic itself.
NEW: WHITE HOUSE AT WAR WITH ALLEGED DRUG CARTELS
MEMO obtained by @NewsNation @JoeKhalilTV to a select few in Congress lays out that DRUG CARTELS are now “non-state armed groups, terrorist organizations” and the President has determined the U.S. is engaged in “non-international… pic.twitter.com/LDbg8mnn2x
— Kellie Meyer (@KellieMeyerNews) October 2, 2025
