President Donald Trump is at it again. The president and his administration are carrying out indiscriminate executions. Since early September, the United States has carried out strikes against 10 boats off the coast of South America for alleged drug trafficking.

The intermittent strikes on sea-going vessels in international waters have killed at least 43 people, and in one instance, two men survived, were captured and repatriated to Colombia and Ecuador.

Trump and "War" Secretary Pete Hegseth have said the boats were known to be involved in drug smuggling, insisting they have the authority to carry out the strikes without authorization from Congress. The men on those boats have not been indicted; they had no right to legal counsel; no right to face their accuser; they have not been convicted of a crime in an American court — yet they have been "executed" for the crime of drug smuggling.

During the second half of 2020, in the midst of a pandemic and a re-election campaign, the Trump administration decided to indiscriminately start executing federal prisoners. After 17 years without carrying out an execution, the federal government carried out 10 in less than six months.

By the end of 2020, the federal government had conducted more executions in five months than any other presidency since the turn of the 20th century and carried out three more executions during a presidential transition more than any other administration in the history of the United States.

Maybe it was a ploy to bolster his tough guy bona fides or a lowbrow pitch to his "law and order" constituency, but Trump's bloodlust saw no boundary. Even after the election was decided, he kept on killing,

The unprecedented executions of 2020 included the first federal execution in 68 years of an offender who was a teenager at the time the crime was committed.

The 2020 executions included the first federal execution in 57 years for a crime committed in a state that had abolished the death penalty, as well as executions carried out against the wishes of the victims' families and the first lame-duck executions in more than a century.

The executions carried out during a pandemic contributed to a COVID-19 outbreak in the Federal Correctional Complex in Terre Haute, Ind. The outbreak infected at least nine members of federal execution teams, several lawyers and at least one religious advisor.

The first Trump administration engineered a reckless flurry of state-sponsored killing — mocking societal norms and devoid of any act of mercy or decency.

At the White House last week, Trump said he thinks lawmakers will support his administration's efforts in the Caribbean. He was asked why then not ask Congress for a declaration of war, his response: "I don't think we're going necessarily to ask for a declaration of war. I think we're just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. OK. We're going to kill them. They're going to be, like, dead."

Can presidents indiscriminately kill? For those on death row, it may not be the norm to carry out a flurry of executions, but those individuals were convicted of first-degree murder, and their cases had been reviewed by various appellate courts.

The drug strikes are different. Brian Finucane, a former legal adviser for the State Department, told NPR, "What this boils down to is the president of the United States asserting a prerogative to kill people based solely on his own say-so." No arrest, no trial and no conviction.

"Outside of armed conflict, there is a word for the premeditated killing of people, and that word is 'murder,'" he said. "And just because the administration puts together this fig leaf of a legal justification does not legitimize these premeditated killings in the Caribbean."

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book The Executioner's Toll, 2010, was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino

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