At Home and on the Seas, Trump Expands Use of American Force

The first time President Trump ordered the U.S. military to attack a small, high-speed motorboat in international waters near Venezuela, he posted the fiery image online and said the deaths of the roughly dozen people on board should be a warning to “narco-terrorists.”

Vice President JD Vance chimed in, telling critics who said the attack amounted to an extrajudicial killing that getting rid of “cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military.”

To drive home his point, Mr. Trump ordered an attack on a second boat on Monday, and told reporters that there had been a third, as well. He also announced on Monday that he would send National Guard troops to Memphis to crack down on crime, and said that after the assassination of the prominent right-wing activist Charlie Kirk last week, investigations had begun into “radical left” groups. Some, administration officials say, may be designated “domestic terrorists.”

Eight months into Mr. Trump’s presidency, Americans and the world are learning a lot about his willingness to use military force, and terrorist designations, as he expands his targeting of perceived enemies, foreign and domestic. It is a notably different approach than during his first term, when Mr. Trump chafed at being held back, including in one instance when his defense secretary said that he could not shoot missiles into Mexico to attack cartel strongholds.

In this term, cabinet members cheer him on, as they did in the Oval Office on Monday, and describe how the laws of counterterrorism are there to be bent to his will.

Much of this is about creating macho imagery, of course. Not long ago, the Department of Homeland Security, which has been issuing World War I- and World War II-style recruitment posters, sent a social media post that showed Mr. Trump on an armored personnel carrier, manning a light machine gun, his signature red tie flapping in the wind behind him.

Even by Trump administration standards, with cabinet members uttering carefully scripted adoration, including lines like “under your leadership” and “at your command,” the symbols broke into new territory.

But beyond the image-making, this is also about a fundamental, though little-discussed, change in the administration’s national security focus.

In Mr. Trump’s first term, his national security strategy was written to turn the focus of the country, and particularly the Defense Department, toward rising threats from China and Russia, after two decades of relentless concentration on counterterrorism. It was a huge change, a slow turning of the vast American defense establishment away from the challenges that emerged from the Sept. 11 attacks to one that centered instead on the economic, military, technological and diplomatic rivalry with Beijing, and on Moscow’s increasing aggressiveness toward Ukraine and Europe.

In the opening months of Mr. Trump’s second term, there was a largely unspoken assumption that those priorities would carry over. It turns out that this belief, like so many others, was wrong.

There has been no national security strategy published in the second term. It may be too early, and some federal officials doubt one will be written at all. But a draft of a new national defense strategy for the Pentagon, yet to be released, is reported to place homeland security, and defense of the Western Hemisphere, at the top of the priorities of what Mr. Trump is now calling the Department of War.

“What we are seeing in Trump’s use of force is different, because his foreign policy and his national security policy is different from the first term,’’ said Ivo Daalder, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO who is now a senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard. “He sees the threat to the homeland as greater than the threat from China. And he likes shooting at targets that can’t shoot back.”

That has certainly been the case in the first part of Mr. Trump’s presidency.

Even this summer, the administration had a different approach: If it saw what it suspected were drug runners headed toward U.S. shores, the Coast Guard would hail the boat. If the occupants refused to surrender, sharpshooters would take out their engines. Those on board were arrested and treated as criminals.

No more. When one social media user challenged Mr. Vance on the Venezuela attacks, saying it was a war crime, his response was direct: “I don’t give a shit what you call it.” It was a striking comment from a man with a Yale law degree and a past willingness to debate the legality, and morality, of lethal state action.

But apart from Senator Rand Paul, the maverick Kentucky Republican, Mr. Vance got little pushback. “Did he ever read ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’?” Mr. Paul asked on social media, referring to the Harper Lee novel that is standard text in most high schools. “Did he ever wonder what might happen if the accused were immediately executed without trial or representation?”

So far the administration has offered no evidence to support its contention that the first boat it struck in international waters was, in fact, carrying drugs. Nor has it provided any for the second boat, or said a word beyond the president’s suggestion that there was a third.

It is too early to know whether the politics will be any different when it comes to sending National Guard troops, and perhaps regular military forces, into more American cities. Again, the administration does not devote much energy to providing the legal basis for its actions; Mr. Trump talks only about results, and has issued a blitz of numbers — some accurate, some misleading — about the drop in crime in Washington.

The other night he stood in front of Joe’s Seafood, Prime Steak & Stone Crab, a restaurant just a few hundred yards from the White House, and claimed that until he had mobilized federal agents and members of the National Guard, Washingtonians feared the neighborhood. That may have been news to the administration officials, including from the nearby Treasury Department, who could be found there many nights.

The mystery now is whether Mr. Trump will take the next step — using the investigatory powers of the Justice Department, the F.B.I. and other agencies — to implicate nongovernmental organizations and political groups for supporting those he calls “leftist radicals,” and leverage the findings to designate some of them as domestic terrorists.

Mr. Trump said on Monday that he would consider just that for “antifa,” a term that began as a shortening for “antifacists” but that has evolved to describe the politics of the far left, often beyond the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. But it is more an amalgam than a movement, so decentralized that it is unclear how the government would figure out its membership.

Mr. Vance insisted, during a conversation on Monday on the late Mr. Kirk’s podcast, that the administration would always protect “constitutionally protected speech.” But the administration does not take an expansive view of what that speech is.

Attorney General Pam Bondi seemed unaware of fundamental First Amendment interpretations earlier this week when she declared, “There’s free speech, and then there’s hate speech.” She added, “We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.”

Within a few hours, facing a backlash, she was forced to amend her remarks without conceding an error, declaring in a social media post that “hate speech that crosses the line into threats of violence is NOT protected by the First Amendment.”

Then there was Mr. Vance himself, who said that commentary on Mr. Kirk’s death could at least cost offenders their jobs.

“By celebrating that murder, apologizing for it and emphasizing not Charlie’s innocence, but the fact that he said things some didn’t like, even to the point of lying about what he actually said, many of these people are creating an environment where things like this are inevitably going to happen,” Mr. Vance said.

He urged listeners to notify employers of anyone heard or seen celebrating Mr. Kirk’s death — though it was unclear whether he also meant people who were taking exception to Mr. Kirk’s views, even while condemning political violence and his assassination.

“You are hurting Australia very much right now,’’ Mr. Trump said, without explaining how a tough question might alter the diplomatic and defense relationship between the two allies. “You set a very bad tone.” He would complain about the correspondent, he said, to Australia’s prime minister, Anthony Albanese, presumably in New York at the opening of the United Nations General Assembly next week.

What Mr. Albanese is supposed to do to protect the president from questions he does not like was not clear.