Using our military, Trump is committing murder on the high seas. Our streets could be next.

That’s a front-page headline from today’s New York Times. Trump is already using armed drones and rockets to kill people in boats on the open sea. He came up with a lame allegation that the people in the boats are terrorists smuggling drugs to “attack” the United States. He claimed that his powers as Commander in Chief under the Constitution make the killings legal. But everybody knows he did it just because he can.

My question is, why is he even bothering to ask for legislation that will allow him to commit murder when he’s already doing it?

The Times describes the draft for the suggested legislation as a “broadly worded proposal, which would legally authorize the president to kill people he deems narco-terrorists and attack countries he says helped them.”

Critics of the three attacks on alleged drug boats, which have killed a total of 17, say the military operations violate the War Powers Resolution of 1973, which requires that if “Armed Forces of the United States are introduced in hostilities,” the use of military force “shall be” reported to the Congress within 48 hours “together with a full account of the circumstances under which such hostilities were initiated, the estimated scope and duration of such hostilities, and the constitutional and legislative authority under which the introduction of hostilities took place.”

There has been no such report to the Congress. In its place, Trump has beaten his chest on Truth Social and in comments to the press, threatening Venezuela and its president that more attacks will happen if they keep sending drug boats to “attack this country.” He has also moved a naval armada into the waters off Venezuela and dispatched a squadron of F-35 fighters to Puerto Rico that are said to be in preparation for more military action against “drug terrorists.”

Trump’s model is clearly President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, who during his eight-year reign in office, oversaw the non-judicial killing of somewhere between 12,000 and 30,000 alleged drug suspects, according to various human rights groups that tried to keep track of the vicious carnage unleashed by Duterte. He urged the police at all levels of Philippine society to shoot drug users and dealers on sight and assured them that if they were charged with criminal offenses for the killings, he would pardon them. Early on in what he called his “anti-drug campaign,” Duterte openly compared himself to Hitler.

The language in the Times story is aching in its careful neutrality in describing Trump’s obvious attempt to unilaterally murder people on the high seas without identifying them or providing even a smidgen of evidence that what they were doing in their boats had anything to do with drugs. The Times reported that at a Senate confirmation hearing for a Defense Department nominee this week, Democrats asked questions about what the legal justification was for the “strikes” on the boats in the open sea. “The Pentagon nominee said he was unable to answer them.”

Trump believes he doesn’t owe anyone any answers for his use of military force against alleged drug smugglers. What he is asking the Congress for is a fig leaf to cover what he’s already doing.

Now I’m going to do something I haven’t done before in any of my many columns about the outrageous authoritarian moves of Donald Trump. In the past, every time Trump has done something, like mass-firings of federal employees at the Department of Education and USAID, my instinct has been, he’ll never get away with that. The courts will step in and stop him. My wife Tracy’s response has always been, you have too much faith in the system. Not only will he get away with it, he’ll do something worse.

As I have learned – as we’ve all seen – Tracy is the one who has been right. What he’s done at the CDC, at the EPA, in the firings of the boards that run independent agencies such as the Labor Relations Board, and countless other outrages is beyond anything I foresaw.

Today, Tracy said that Trump won’t stop with killing people he claims without evidence are “terrorists” in boats off the coast of Venezuela. He has already put armed soldiers on the streets of multiple cities in this country, and he has announced plans to deploy more. He is asking for legislation that will allow him to unilaterally declare foreign nationals as “terrorists” without evidence and order that they be killed by the U.S. military. What is to stop him from seeking to do the same thing within the borders of this country, using the same justification? He has already declared that undocumented immigrants are part of a “foreign invasion force.” He has used a law passed in 1798, the Alien Enemies Act, to order the deportation of foreign nationals to third countries where they have been imprisoned under terrible conditions and tortured without legal representation or due process of law. Why wouldn’t he invoke that law, or ask his puppet Congress to pass him a new one, that will give him non-judicial powers to imprison or even kill people accused of various offenses he has made up out of whole cloth, because he has labeled them as “terrorists” or they are engaged in a “war against the people of America?” He has already declared that journalists are “enemies of the people,” and think about all the people he has accused of treason, such as Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff and former President Obama. His list of made-up criminals gets longer by the day.

We already know what he will do. From recent evidence, he will use any justification he can come up with, no matter how spurious or ridiculous, and he will do anything he wants to do, declaring, as he already has, that as President, “I can do anything I want to do.”

I am finished giving our system of laws and checks and balances the benefit of the doubt. Our Democratic system is not working. Right now, Donald Trump is killing civilian non-combatants outside of the borders of this country without providing the Congress or anyone else any justification for what he is doing beyond his powers as President.

Tracy is right. He will expand on his horrors. We could be next.