“Every boat we knock out, we save 25,000 American lives,” Donald Trump said in October. These American lives were supposedly being saved from fentanyl, which Trump said was being smuggled in the boats the U.S. military was attacking: “And you can see it, the boats get hit, and you see that fentanyl all over the ocean. It’s like floating in bags. It’s all over the place.”
Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson repeated this claim on December 2: “Every single boat that we strike saves 25,000 American lives.”
This casus belli is a lie at every level. We’re going to examine each part of it so that you understand (a) exactly how and why this charge is a lie and (b) how Trump has used little lies like this to short-circuit American democracy...
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