Donald Trump’s administration is willing to trample the law in service of their objectives, even—and perhaps especially—when those objectives include getting people killed. Don’t take my word for it, listen to secretary of war Pete Hegseth: “Maximum lethality, not tepid legality.”
This is not a witty quip. It is an open admission that Donald Trump and the decision-makers in his orbit refuse to be constrained by the laws established by either our elected representatives or the Constitution. It makes a certain kind of sense: These are the same checks-and-balances we have in place to protect our individual rights from the overreach of a rogue government. The Trump administration has taken more than 2,000 actions to undermine democracy so far.
Explicitly advocating for extrajudicial killing is the obvious next step once you trample on individual rights and secure a dictatorship.
Careless with lives at home and abroad
While the debate around Pete Hegseth has revolved around deciding whether a second military strike on alleged drug-runners is a war crime, or good, old-fashioned murder, the past eleven months have demonstrated that this “lethality over legality” mindset is part of a broad pattern of deadly actions without legal authority. This pattern is not contained to foreign policy operations like unilateral military strikes on Iran, or the violent murder of North Korean civilians, or the abuse of immigrants unlawfully renditioned to CECOT. The Trump administration’s carelessness with lives extends to our own citizens.
Here in the states, the administration also refuses to follow the law. ICE officers routinely manhandle or neglect medical treatment for pregnant women, including one case that resulted in the stillbirth of her child. Reports abound about the mistreatment of immigrants in ICE detention, failing to meet their own self-imposed standards. ICE officers themselves are among the ill, forced to remain with deportees in Djibouti while lawsuits play out in the United States.
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The Trump administration dismisses the lives of the people they are supposed to serve. They have declared war on Chicago, deploying another state’s National Guard against US citizens. They’ve denied due process to citizen children with cancer, interrupting their medical treatment and denying their parents contact with legal counsel or the opportunity to find a caretaker for their children. When reports about this mistreatment, denial of due process, and defiance of federal courts drew protests in Los Angeles, the Trump administration decided that rather than comply with the law and constitutionally protected rights, they would instead deploy the National Guard and Marines to intimidate and suppress dissent.
Trump is as careless with veteran’s lives as he is with everyone else’s. Cuts to Veterans Affairs actively endanger those who have served our country. “Severe occupational staffing shortages” rose 50% from 2024 levels in an agency that has been underfunded long before Trump’s cuts of 30,000 jobs. A portion of these firings were of probationary employees, whose suits against the government are still playing out in court. These veterans faithfully uphold an oath that Trump has taken twice, but still doesn’t know if he has to follow.
Unprecedented and unnecessary destruction of our most vulnerable
It’s beyond alarming that Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump refuse to follow the Constitution abroad, which grants Congress, not the executive, the authority to declare war. The Trump administrations actions will be deadly long after we put his presidency in the rearview mirror. Federal judges as well as the Government Accountability Office have found that the regime violated the law and the First Amendment by withholding Congressionally-authorized research funding—a move that drastically slowed research studying cancer, dementia, and other diseases. But judges stopping this lawlessness can only mitigate damage, not undo it. A poll of more than 1,200 US scientists found that 75% are considering leaving the country after these disruptions. The result is a brain-drain that will leave the US vulnerable to disease now and into the future.
Likewise, medical organizations allege that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. unlawfully restricted COVID-19 vaccine availability to pregnant women and healthy children. Evidence shows that vaccines save lives. Spurred by rhetoric like Kennedy’s, a gunman shot up the Center for Disease Control headquarters in Atlanta, and then took his own life, because he “wanted to make the public aware of his public distrust of the vaccines.” This administration’s unlawful actions are killing people, and will kill more, as a host of former CDC Directors from Republican and Democrat administrations alike have warned.
LGBTQ+ people are among the most vulnerable, and the federal government has further harmed them by removing information from numerous federal websites with information about LGBTQ+ youth suicide, and care guidance for LGBTQ+ veterans. The administration chose to settle a lawsuit bringing the pages back, but has not restored services for LGBTQ+ youth who call the national 988 suicide hotline. (If you are experiencing thoughts of suicide as an LGBTQ+ person, call the Trevor Project suicide hotline.)
Unfit for Office
These are not partisan observations. The “lethality over legality” mindset of this administration has continuously resulted in actions that harm people both in America and abroad. From rural America to the suburbs to the cities, from blue states to red states, young people and old people, we will all be worse off from Trump’s “lethality over legality” approach.
These actions are more than “concerning” or “alarming” or even “unprecedented.” The building is on fire. We cannot afford to wait until the next election (though we do have a crop of Courage Candidates who are ready to remove Trump from office on day one.) People are dying from the lawless actions of Donald Trump and his cabinet of treasonous cronies. Congress must stand up for the American people, and stop this lethal-not-legal administration in its tracks. He must be impeached, convicted, and removed. We will not be able to undo all the damage already done by his tyrannical behavior, but we can stop it before it gets worse, and it’s our moral imperative to do so.
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