US President Donald Trump insisted on Friday, October 24, that he could continue to launch strikes against alleged drug traffickers abroad without Congress first passing an official declaration of war.

 

 

“I’m not going to necessarily ask for a declaration of war,” he said. “I think we’re just doing to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. Okay? We’re going to kill them, you know, they’re going to be like, dead.”

 

 

Trump’s dismissal came as he suggested his administration would soon begin targeting those deemed as cartel members within countries like Venezuela, in addition to continuing to strike alleged drug boats in international waters. The president said he would notify Congress before beginning any operations on “land” but contended the plan would not face any pushback from lawmakers.

 

 

 

“We going to go. I don’t see any loss in going” to Congress, Trump said. “We’re going to tell them what we’re going to do and I think they’ll probably like it, except for the radical left lunatics.”

 

 

The lethal strikes on vessels in the Caribbean and east Pacific have unnerved some lawmakers, given the little evidence the administration has presented proving that the targets were so-called narco-terrorists.

 

 

 

 

On Thursday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth insisted that the military has confirmed that each targeted boat is trafficking drugs. He defended the decision to return two survivors of a recent strike as “standard” practice in war. He stated that in past conflicts like Iraq and Afghanistan, the vast majority of people captured were handed over to their home country. “So in this case, those two, they were treated by American medics and handed immediately over to their countries where they came from.”

 

 

Trump’s remarks came as an American B-1 Lancer bomber flew near the coast of Venezuela on Thursday, although the president denied that the U.S. sent the bomber.

 

 

 

 

 

“No, it’s not accurate. No. It’s false. But we’re not happy with Venezuela for a lot of reasons. Drugs being one of them, but also they’ve been sending their prisoners into our country for years under the Biden administration, not anymore, we have a closed border,” Trump said.

 

 

 

The aircraft first appeared on flight-tracking dashboards southwest of the Dallas Fort Worth area around 4:30 a.m. ET on Thursday. At its closest point, it was a little more than 50 miles from the Venezuelan mainland. Open-source flight data later showed the bomber reappearing for around 15 minutes within Venezuela’s flight information region (FIR), although it was not immediately clear whether the plane entered Venezuelan airspace.

 

 

 

The flight occurs as tensions continue to rise between the two countries following the deployment of U.S. warships to the Caribbean as part of what Washington calls a counter-drug trafficking campaign. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro on Wednesday claimed his country had 5,000 Russian-made Igla-S anti-aircraft missiles in “key air defense positions,” systems capable of shooting down small aerial targets like low-flying planes.