Trump won’t get to heaven if he keeps murdering people on boats

If Donald Trump is serious about wanting to get to heaven, he has a very odd strategy.

This was the stark subject line on an email the 47th president sent to his supporters at 10:54 a.m. on Tuesday, as the nation staggered back to work after Labor Day: “I want to try to get to Heaven.”

It wasn’t the first time in recent days that Trump has mused about his eternal fate, which sounds like the long-overdue stirrings of a late-life conscience, but in reality is just a huckster’s brainstorm that if half the internet thinks he’s dead or dying, why not raise a few bucks off this.

Trump said his near-miss with an assassin’s bullet in Butler, Pa., last year is “why I’ve launched a 24 HOUR TRUMP FUNDRAISING BLITZ, and I’m asking everyone to chip in $15 to make it one for the record books!” I’m not really sure how amassing a huge political war chest gets one through the pearly gates. Is the Trump super PAC going to target St. Peter with 30-second spots? But the president also seems wildly uneducated about what it really takes to avoid the eternal hellfires of the Bad Place.

Just hours after Trump’s plea for everlasting life, he ordered, then celebrated, the mass killing of 11 human beings on a boat in the southern Caribbean Sea, somewhere off Venezuela. This was kind of like scribbling down your 2025 New Year’s resolution to lose weight while sitting in the drive-through line at Kentucky Fried Chicken.

The U.S. military missile strike Tuesday that obliterated the power boat — which the Trump regime alleged, with zero evidence, was manned by Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang members bringing a shipment of narcotics to the United States — was such a shocking event that it took a day or so for the America media to even wrap their arms about what the heck just happened here.

Some of that, to be fair, stems from a complete lack of transparency by the White House and the U.S. Department of Defense. Trump and his minions were eager to boast to the world about their ability to kill people, as the president quickly posted the 28-second South American “snuff video” of the boat’s annihilation to the White House social media accounts.

But there was little or no information about who these 11 formerly alive boat passengers were, what type of drugs the boat was allegedly carrying, where the boat was headed, exactly where the U.S. attack took place, or how the strike was carried out. That’s bad — American citizens are entitled to real information when killings are done in our name — but it’s not nearly as bad as this:

The Trump regime offered no legal justification — let alone a moral one — for blowing up in international waters a ship carrying civilians from a nation with which the United States is not at war. Or why the standard practice of warning and then interdicting a ship believed to be involved in drug trafficking — and arresting any suspects and bringing them to trial — wasn’t followed in this case.

“Pentagon officials were still working Wednesday on what legal authority they would tell the public was used to back up the extraordinary strike in international waters,” the New York Times reported. It’s bad enough when those in authority shoot first and ask questions later. In this case, the Trump regime, upon direct orders from the president, shot and killed first, and 24 hours later, was still trying to simply figure out what the right questions were.

In an era of too much mealymouthed journalism, let’s call out this U.S. strike for what it really was: A cold-blooded murder, carried out in broad Caribbean daylight. An assassination. And a war crime.

And details on this Trump-ordered hit were so scant that aides to Venezuela’s strongman ruler, Nicolás Maduro, got some traction by claiming the attack didn’t really happen, and that the Trump video is artificial intelligence, or AI. That’s almost certainly a lie — the South American dictator is no better at truth-telling than his U.S. counterpart — but it’s alarming that top American officials can’t even agree on whether the boat was headed for U.S. shores or for Trinidad, among other key details.

Even worse, people who actually know what they’re talking about — either pre-Trump government officials or career military brass, only willing to speak to the Times anonymously — questioned whether the doomed boat’s cargo was really drugs, or might instead be migrants seeking to flee Maduro’s misrule and come to America.

They noted that you’d rarely need or want 11 people on a ship carrying illicit drugs — usually just two or three would suffice — as well as other glaring inconsistencies in the Trump regime’s version. The Times reporting included this jaw-dropping assessment: “In the former official’s opinion, it was more likely that the vessel was carrying migrants on a human smuggling run.” A rogue government that employs a masked secret police to snatch undocumented immigrants off American streets now may be executing them on the high seas.

Scan the news, and the only folks voicing unqualified support are pro-MAGA, bootlicking politicians like South Carolina GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham, who called the lethal strike the “ultimate — and most welcome — sign that we have a new sheriff in town.” This from a former Air Force lawyer who surely knows there are no legal grounds for the bombing.

What you won’t find in any article is a single expert or scholar who believes the attack was in any way legal. Simply put, no one with any real-world familiarity with international law and the rules of engagement thinks that even the possible justifications — such as the 2001 vote authorizing military action against al-Qaeda and related terrorist groups — can justify a summary execution for a crime that’s not even a capital offense under American law.

» READ MORE: Finally, a pol does the thing he promised voters! The pol is Trump. The thing is fascism. | Will Bunch

“Labelling everyone a terrorist does not make them a lawful target and enables states to side-step international law,” professor Luke Moffett of Queen’s University Belfast told the BBC. But then, even the worst person you know just made a good point, as Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul told Newsmax that “even the worst people in our country, they still get a trial.”

As appalling as this Caribbean incident is, there are even bigger reasons to be concerned. Most immediately, the attack didn’t occur in a vacuum, but at a time when Trump’s Defense Department had sent a substantial, menacing naval brigade to the waters off Venezuela, a leftist dictatorship where U.S. officials and certain oligarchs have long salivated over the possibility of regime change. It’s not hard to imagine Trump sees the Caribbean waters as a 21st-century Gulf of Tonkin, where an ambiguous encounter could spark the wider war sought by the White House.

Even more alarming, if that’s possible, is the notion that Trump — in ordering an extrajudicial killing without either legal or congressional authority, and facing no immediate consequences — is sending a much bigger message to a restive American citizenry and the world. He is telling us his power, even over life and death, is now limitless.

This is what Chief Justice John Roberts and the rest of his craven and corrupted conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court wrought when they declared Trump to be a king who is above the law for any presidential acts. In theory, courtroom opponents argued in 2024 that such a ruling would allow Trump to order SEAL Team 6 to kill his political opponents. In reality, Tuesday was what that ugly decision looks like. A president who’s not sure if he’s going to heaven playing God with the lives of 11 total strangers, killing them for his sport.

And you or I could be next. It seemed no accident the Caribbean hit job was intermingled with Oval Office talk that Trump also wants to send more armed National Guard troops into more U.S. cities — maybe Chicago, maybe New Orleans, maybe some other city Trump chooses on a 3 a.m. whim. The bigger message is unmistakable, especially as the president’s poll numbers slide, and as a clearly ailing Trump slowly slouches toward his own mortality. Resistance is futile. It could get you killed.

As for Trump’s inner angst, you’ll never get to heaven if you break … a boat, with mortal souls on board. If the president truly cared about seeing the Good Place, he’d be volunteering in a soup kitchen. Instead, Trump might want to prepare for the afterlife by packing his summer clothes.

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