7 November—Last night, Donald Trump’s equally repulsive and culpable warlord, Pete Hegseth, gleefully announced the 17^th multiple killing of their current pelagic murder spree in the southern Caribbean and eastern Pacific. So far. The genocide is bound to metastasize. (Don’t bother looking up “pelagic,” by the way; it means “pertaining to the open sea,” as opposed to “littoral,” which means “pertaining to the shore.”)

Trump’s criminal conspirators justify the murders they authorize and commit by insisting that the United States is engaged in an armed conflict with specified and unspecified drug cartels whose unspecified operatives are “unlawful combatants” whose actions, according to an alleged confidential note to Congress, “constitute an armed attack against the United States.”

But Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul had no hesitation in calling the premeditated extrajudicial killing of people outside of armed conflict—lacking both due process and evidence—“murder.” Just plain murder. In arguing for his purely symbolic motion to prevent the Trump maladministration from conducting the quasi-military strikes without congressional approval—which failed anyway in the gutless Trumpublican-majority Senate—Sen. Paul emphasized that the United States can’t have a policy of “blowing up every ship we suspect or accuse of drug running” without due process, pointing out that not every victimized boat had drugs.

And even if it is an actual war, Sen. Paul insisted, Congress must authorize any war carried out by U.S. military forces. He recognized that during war “lower rules for engagement” often obtain and “people do sometimes get killed without due process.” But “a briefing is not enough to overcome the Constitution. The Constitution says that when you go to war, Congress has to vote on it. To be clear, we’ve got no information. I’ve been invited to no briefing.”

When Donald Trump is thrown out of office in 2028, along with Trumpublican congressional majorities, it’s expected—or at least hoped—that a depoliticized, deweaponized justice department will prosecute him and his top conspirators for the drug-related murders (because that’s precisely what they are), as well as other unlawful acts he and they have committed and are likely to commit during Trump’s reign of terror.

Trump himself may be able to get off, thanks to last year’s Supreme Court misruling, even though murder isn’t among a president’s unpunishable prerogatives. But Hegseth, to name but one obvious top-level ready, willing, and enthusiastic conspirator, isn’t immune from prosecution for anything. Including murder. And there’s no federal statute of limitations on murder.

Of course, Hegseth and other high-ranking Trump conspirator-murderers could cop the so-called Nuremberg defense like the top Nazis at the post-WW II Nuremberg trials: “Just following orders.” Sure. But it didn’t work for Hitler’s Nazis. And it shouldn’t work for Trump’s Nazis.

Apropos nothing, Trump made a point of lifting Joe Biden’s moratorium on the death penalty . . .