‘We’re just gonna kill people’: Trump says he doesn’t need a declaration of war for strikes on suspected drug smugglers
Donald Trump’s statement on Thursday that he has no intention of asking Congress for a declaration of war ahead of possible strikes on suspected drug smugglers in Venezuela, “we’re just gonna kill people that are bringing drugs into our country”, thrilled his supporters but disturbed many Americans.
Asked by a reporter if he intended to go to Congress, Trump suggested that his administration would brief lawmakers on the military operation, but said that he saw no reason to seek congressional authorization.
“I don’t think we’re gonna necessarily ask for a declaration of war, I think we’re just gonna kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. OK? We’re gonna to kill them. They’re going to be, like, dead,” the president said.
While Trump supporters posted video of the remarks on social media with a mic-drop emoji, a Democratic party account posted it without comment, apparently certain that the president’s violation of constitutional provision that only Congress can declare war was obvious.
Justin Amash, a former Republican congressman from Michigan, was more explicit in his criticism. “The Constitution doesn’t permit a president to act as the legislature and judiciary on top of being the chief executive,” Amash wrote on X. “If it’s war, he must go to Congress. If it’s crime, he must go to court. When there’s no imminent danger, there’s no justification for unilateral strikes.”
“I don’t know how anyone can read the absurd commentary from Maga, Inc., accounts regarding war powers and think these people are any better than the neocons on war,” he added. “If anything, the rhetoric is much more supportive now of unilateral militarism than it was even in the early 2000s.”
Adam Schiff, a Democratic senator from California, responded to Trump’s statement with the comment: “The president should come to Congress. Legally, he is required to come to Congress. Though he may not get the answer he expects. Americans don’t want another war.”
Last week, Schiff joined senators Tim Kaine, a Virginia Democrat, and Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, to introduce a war powers resolution that would have blocked the use of US military strikes within or against Venezuela. The measure failed to win a majority in the Senate.
Key events
Closing summary
This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day, but we will be back at it on Friday. Here are the latest developments:
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The federal government remains shut down.
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Donald Trump canceled plans for a federal deployment to San Francisco at the request of two billionaire supporters, but he reiterated threats to Chicago.
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Trump said that he does not plan to ask Congress to declare war on Venezuela, ahead of possible strikes targeting suspected drug cartels as “we’re just gonna kill people”.
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Trump said an unnamed “friend” had just sent him “a check for $130m” to be used to pay military salaries during the government shutdown.
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A federal judge in Texas on Thursday dismissed a lawsuit filed by a Republican congressman who argued that California’s redistricting proposal would cause him personal injury and should be blocked.
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Trump claimed his militarized war on drugs was a huge improvement over the Biden administration’s effort, but a government database shows drug seizures are down from 2022.
Trump boasted of drug seizures, which are down from 2022
At the White House on Thursday, Donald Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, recited a list of drugs seized by an administration taskforce, and attributed its great success to the president’s aggressive enforcement policies, including using the military to carry out lethal strikes on suspected drug smuggling boats.
However, according to a government database, the weight of drugs seized during the first months of the Trump administration appear to be similar to or even slightly lower than those seized at some points during the Biden administration.
The Drug Seizures dashboard on the website of US Customs and Border Protection show that the total weight of illegal narcotics seized in the first seven months since Trump took office is 373,600 lbs. That is up from the totals for the same period in 2024, which was 343,000 lbs, and 2023, which was 344,7000 lbs, but is is down from the same period in 2022, when the Biden administration seized 379,000 lbs of drugs.
The overall weight of drugs seized for fiscal year 2025, was 531,000 lbs as of September. In fiscal year 2022, it was 656,000 lbs.
Who owns CNN’s parent company ‘is very important to the administration’ – report
The Trump administration is making it known, through a report by a Fox Business correspondent published in the New York Post on Thursday, that it wants CNN’s parent company, Warner Bros Discovery, to be sold to his supporter Larry Ellison’s family.
“Who owns Warner Bros. Discovery is very important to the administration,” a senior Trump administration official reportedly told Charles Gasparino of Fox.
“The Warner board needs to think very seriously not just on the price competition, but which player in the suitor pool has been successful getting a deal done. And that points to the Ellisons,” the official said, referring to Paramount Skydance, run by David Ellison, the son of the billionaire Oracle founder.
The report from Gasparino also made explicit the fact that the White House could ease regulatory hurdles for its favored bidder.
Paramount Skydance, which has bid for Warner Bros Discovery, already owns CBS News and Comedy Central, home of John Stewart’s Daily Show, where Trump is often mocked and criticized. A combined company would also control CNN and HBO, which produces John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight, which also puts Trump under a harsh spotlight.
According to Gasparino, one rival bidder, Comcast, is weighed down by both “the anti-MAGA coverage of the cable giant’s far-left network MSNBC” and NBC’s Saturday Night Live, which employs a comedian largely because of his unflattering Trump impersonation.
‘We’re just gonna kill people’: Trump says he doesn’t need a declaration of war for strikes on suspected drug smugglers
Donald Trump’s statement on Thursday that he has no intention of asking Congress for a declaration of war ahead of possible strikes on suspected drug smugglers in Venezuela, “we’re just gonna kill people that are bringing drugs into our country”, thrilled his supporters but disturbed many Americans.
Asked by a reporter if he intended to go to Congress, Trump suggested that his administration would brief lawmakers on the military operation, but said that he saw no reason to seek congressional authorization.
“I don’t think we’re gonna necessarily ask for a declaration of war, I think we’re just gonna kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. OK? We’re gonna to kill them. They’re going to be, like, dead,” the president said.
While Trump supporters posted video of the remarks on social media with a mic-drop emoji, a Democratic party account posted it without comment, apparently certain that the president’s violation of constitutional provision that only Congress can declare war was obvious.
Justin Amash, a former Republican congressman from Michigan, was more explicit in his criticism. “The Constitution doesn’t permit a president to act as the legislature and judiciary on top of being the chief executive,” Amash wrote on X. “If it’s war, he must go to Congress. If it’s crime, he must go to court. When there’s no imminent danger, there’s no justification for unilateral strikes.”
“I don’t know how anyone can read the absurd commentary from Maga, Inc., accounts regarding war powers and think these people are any better than the neocons on war,” he added. “If anything, the rhetoric is much more supportive now of unilateral militarism than it was even in the early 2000s.”
Adam Schiff, a Democratic senator from California, responded to Trump’s statement with the comment: “The president should come to Congress. Legally, he is required to come to Congress. Though he may not get the answer he expects. Americans don’t want another war.”
Last week, Schiff joined senators Tim Kaine, a Virginia Democrat, and Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, to introduce a war powers resolution that would have blocked the use of US military strikes within or against Venezuela. The measure failed to win a majority in the Senate.
Trump says ‘a friend’ sent him a check for $130m to pay military salaries during the shutdown
At the very end of his freewheeling response to questions from reporters on Thursday, Donald Trump said an unnamed “friend” had just sent him “a check for $130 million” to be used to pay military salaries during the government shutdown.
As a reporter tried to ask the president a question about federal workers going without paychecks during the shutdown, Trump interrupted to say: “Yeah, I hate it. By the way, a man, a friend of mine, talking about donors, a friend of mine, a man that’s great, I’m not going to use his name unless he lets me do it … he called us the other day and he said ‘I’d like to contribute, any shortfall you have because of the Democrat shutdown, I’d like to contribute, personally contribute, any shortfall you have with the military, because I love the military and I love the country, and any shortfall, if there’s a shortfall, I’ll contribute it.’”
“Today, he sent us a check for $130m,” the president said.
Asked who the person was, Trump replied: “I would love to tell you, he deserves, he doesn’t really want the recognition.”
“He gave us a check for $130m,” Trump said again. “It’s gonna go to the military.”
He then looked across at his White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, and asked: “Is that the correct number?”
She nodded yes and said: “Um-hmm.”
Federal judge in Texas dismisses Republican congressman’s suit to block California redistricting vote
A federal judge in Texas on Thursday dismissed a lawsuit filed by a Republican congressman who argued that California’s redistricting proposal would cause him personal injury and should be blocked.
The lawsuit was filed by Ronny Jackson, who ran for Congress after serving as Donald Trump’s White House physician, in his hometown of Amarillo, Texas, where the sole judge is Matthew Kacsmaryk, an arch-conservative Christian who was nominated by Trump.
Republican activists often file suits in Amarillo expecting a favorable hearing from Kacsmaryk. In 2023, for instance, the judge effectively banned mifepristone nationwide, when he issued an injunction temporarily removing FDA approval of a medication used for more than half of all abortions in the United States. The supreme court later overturned that decision.
Kacsmaryk, however, disappointed conservatives on Thursday, when he ruled in favor of a motion to dismiss Jackson’s lawsuit brought by California’s governor and secretary of state.
Jackson had argued he would be injured if California re-drew its maps in a way that could elect more Democrats to Congress and potentially cost his Republican party the majority. The congressman said that he would be injured by losing “his current legislative powers as chair of two subcommittees and personal access to a larger staff of advisors”, his “influence over the congressional majority”, and “opportunities to enhance his media visibility”.
Kacsmaryk ruled that Jackson had “failed to show that California’s approval” of its new Congressional map would actually injure him, and so that he would not take the step Jackson had requested of blocking California’s November special election to ask voters to approve the redistricting plan.
Lauren Gambino
Speaking to reporters at City Hall, San Francisco mayor Daniel Lurie elaborated on his Wednesday evening call with Donald Trump.
Lurie said he had not reached out to Trump but that the president “picked up the phone and called me”. During the call, Lurie said he told Trump that crime was falling in San Francisco and the city was “on the rise”. Pressed on whether Trump sought any concessions from the city in exchange for calling off the “surge” Lurie said he “asked for nothing”.
Lurie said he did not know if Trump’s decision extended to the rest of the Bay Area and acknowledged that the mercurial president could yet change his mind.
“Our city remains prepared for any scenario,” Lurie said. “We have a plan in place that can be activated at any moment.”
Asked if other Democratic mayors could learn from his approach, which has been notably less antagonistic than the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, Lurie demurred, suggesting that was more a question for the political chattering class than for a mayor “laser-focused” on his city.
“Every day I’m focused on San Francisco,” he said. “Heads down. How do we keep our city safe?”
Maya Yang
Former New York City mayor Bill de Blasio has condemned a racist AI-generated ad posted – and then deleted – by Andrew Cuomo’s campaign depicting “criminals for Zohran Mamdani”.
On Thursday, De Blasio wrote on X: “This is disqualifying. No candidate who approves a racist, disgusting ad like this can be allowed to govern. Bye, @andrewcuomo.”
The ad which was shared on Cuomo’s official account on Wednesday featured Mamdani, the popular democratic socialist state assemblyman, eating rice with his hands before being supported by a Black man shoplifting while wearing a keffiyeh, a man abusing a woman, a sex trafficker and a drug dealer.
In June, Mamdani, who if elected would be the city’s first Muslim mayor, accused donors of Cuomo’s campaign of “blatant Islamophobia” after an altered image of him in a mailer to voters depicted him with a visibly darkened and bushier beard.
Maanvi Singh
Outside of San Francisco’s city hall on Thursday afternoon, local leaders and organizers were grappling with the whiplash.
“At this time, do not know which federal agencies are being called off. We don’t know if that’s the National Guard. We don’t know if it’s ice, if it’s Border Patrol,” said Jackie Fielder, the San Francisco city supervisor representing parts of the city’s Mission neighborhood. “I also want to be clear that ICE, CBP, any federal agency deputized by Trump, to help him carry out his mass deportation plans, are absolutely not welcome in San Francisco.”
Fielder also criticized Benihoff, Musk and other tech leaders who had voiced support for a National Guard deployment in the Bay Area. “I condemn every tech billionaire who supported this,” she said. “This city doesn’t belong to them.”
Fielder and other leaders and organizers emphasized that even as the region awaits clarity on whether and where there will be a federal deployment, and the extent to which the administration plans to ramp up immigration enforcement in the city, local leaders are going to continue to mobilize rapid response networks, legal aid and other support systems for the residents most impacted.
“We don’t need to get ready because we’ve been ready,” Fielder said. “This is not a time for panic. It is a time for power across this area.”
Organizers urged residents to check in regularly with friends and family, and prepare for the possibility that they may be arrested by immigration officers, urging immigrants to entrust their full legal names and A-Numbers with trusted allies. “Without this information, it becomes very challenging, and it takes time to locate our loved ones,” said Sanika Mahajan, Director of Community Engagement and Organizing for the local advocacy group Mission Action. Organizers who had lent support during the militarized raids in Los Angeles this summer encouraged San Franciscans to store important documents at home, and let loved ones know where to find them.
‘Mexico is run by the cartels, I have great respect for the president,’ Trump says
“Mexico is run by the cartels, I have great respect for the president”, Donald Trump just said near the end of the White House event to justify what he calls the success of his militarized war on drugs. “Mexico is run by the cartels and we have to defend ourselves from that”.
After a first phase of the roundtable discussion, in which senior administration officials took turns praising Trump and claimed that the crackdown on drugs has been a spectacular success, the president then took questions from reporters invited to cover the event.
Many of the correspondents he called on were from partisan, rightwing outlets who also laced their questions with praise for the president.
Clearly aware that many of the correspondents he called on to ask questions were on his side, Trump even said “This is the kind of question I like” to Daniel Baldwin of the pro-Trump news channel One America News, before Baldwin even asked his question.
When Trump did not recognize a correspondent, he asked them who they were with.
And when he did call on a reporter he views as adversarial, Kaitlan Collins of CNN, he even made a point of joking that her question would be a bad one.
No matter what the questions were, Trump repeated many of his familiar talking points, exaggerations, insults and lies, including that the Biden administration had “lost” hundreds of thousands of children.
At one point, unprompted, he said: “Let me tell ya, Barack Hussein Obama was a lousy president.”
Donald Trump was just asked about a call from Daniel Goldman, a Democratic congressman from New York, for the New York police department to arrest federal agents “who assault or detain New Yorkers without legal authority” during immigration raids or outside immigration courts in New York City.
Goldman referred specifically to a woman who was hurled to the floor by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer outside a court.
“Well, you know, I know Dan, and Dan’s a loser,” Trump replied. “It’s so ridiculous, a suggestion like that.”
What Trump did not explain is that he no doubt knows Goldman primarily from his role as lead counsel in the first impeachment of Trump, over his attempt to force Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, to open a sham investigation into Joe Biden in 2019 by withholding military aid.
Rather than address the issue, Trump then pivoted to suggesting that Democrats were desperate for attention and even imitating him by cursing more in public. Goldman did not curse when he told reporters on Tuesday: “No one is above the law – not ICE, not CBP, and not Donald Trump. Federal agents who assault or detain New Yorkers without legal authority must be held accountable and the NYPD must protect our neighbors if the federal government refuses to.”
Trump says ‘Don’t worry about the West Bank, Israel’s not going to do anything with the West Bank’
Donald Trump was just asked by a French reporter about the vote in the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, on formal annexation of the occupied West Bank, a Palestinian territory that Israel has occupied since 1967, where hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers now live, in a violation of international law.
He asked the reporter to repeat the question but louder. She did, in a distinct French accent.
Trump asked Pam Bondi, seated next to him to answer, saying, “I cannot understand a word she’s saying”.
When the question was then explained to him, the president told the reporter: “Don’t worry about the West Bank, Israel’s not going to do anything with the West Bank.”
Earlier on Thursday, the vice-president, JD Vance, said that Israel would not annex the West Bank, the day after Israeli lawmakers voted to advance two bills paving the way for the territory’s annexation.
“If it was a political stunt it was a very stupid political stunt and I personally take some insult to it,” Vance said on the tarmac as he wrapped up his visit in Israel.
Israeli analysts have pointed out that Israel currently rules the entire West Bank, except for limited urban enclaves under Palestinian self-rule, as if it were formally part of its territory.
As is customary of Trump’s public-facing events, he has spent much of his time speaking blaming the Biden administration for the country he inherited.
“By the way, the cartels control large swaths of territory. They maintain vast arsenals of weapons and soldiers, and they used extortion, murder, kidnapping, to exercise political and economic control,” he said. “Thank you very much, Joe Biden, for allowing that to happen. Biden surrendered our country to the cartels.”
Trump says that he will ‘take care of Chicago’, continues threats to deploy national guard
Donald Trump continued his threats to send the national guard to Chicago.
“They don’t have it under control,” Trump said. “It’s getting worse, so we’ll take care of as soon as we give the go ahead.”
This comes as the administration filed an emergency appeal to the supreme court after a federal judge blocked the administration’s from deploying troops to the Chicago indefinitely.
Trump claims success in curbing cartels following ninth strike of alleged drug vessel
The president has spent his opening remarks claiming his administration’s efforts in curbing cartels had been successful.
“These groups have unleashed more bloodshed and killing on American soil than all other terrorist groups combined. These are the worst of the worst. It should now be clear to the entire world that the cartels are the Isis of the western hemisphere,” he said.
We’re waiting for Donald Trump to appear in the state dining room for an announcement on cartels and human trafficking. Several cabinet members are already seated. Including defense secretary Pete Hegseth, attorney general Pam Bondi, and homeland security secretary Kristi Noem.
It’s important to note that so far, Donald Trump has paid members of the military by ordering the Pentagon to use any unspent funds for the 2025 fiscal year. A move that experts and lawmakers alike say is squarely illegal.
Romina Boccia, director of budget and entitlement policy at Cato Institute, emphasized that Congress has the sole prerogative to authorize funding.
“The executive can’t just look for money under the cushions. It’s not their money to spend,” Boccia said. “If Congress doesn’t step up and reclaim its spending authority, the administration here is potentially setting very dangerous new precedents for executive spending that was never envisioned by America’s founders.”
She added that there is the option for the administration to repurpose “unobligated balances” using the rescissions process. However, this isn’t playing out in this case because it still requires Congress’s authorization.
“What we’re witnessing is the executive taking unprecedented steps to repurpose funding unilaterally,” Boccia said.
While today’s failed Senate vote might give Trump the “political justification” for inappropriate government spending, there was no “legal justification”.
Pivoting back to the Senate, where lawmakers failed to pass a bill to keep certain government workers and members of the military paid during the government shutdown.
As I noted earlier, only three Democrats broke ranks with their party to vote in favor of the legislation. Most Democratic lawmakers voted against the bill, arguing that it would give Donald Trump the ability to handpick which workers and departments get to receive paychecks. Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, called the bill a “ruse” that “doesn’t the pain of the shutdown” but “extends it”.
Democrats also offered alternative pieces of legislation. This included the True Shutdown Fairness Act, which would pay all roughly 700,000 furloughed federal employees, and inhibit the administration from carrying out any more mass layoffs while the government is shutdown. Senate Republicans, however, objected to their attempt to pass this bill by unanimous consent.
John Thune, the upper chamber’s top Republican, said that Democrats are “playing a political game” by blocking today’s bill, in an attempt to appease their “far-left base”. On the Senate floor, Thune said that the failed legislation introduced by Republicans today would include the more than 300 federal workers at the Capitol who had to “work through the night and into the next day” during Oregon senator Jeff Merkley’s marathon speech lambasting the Trump administration, which lasted almost 23 hours.
