Trump escalates plan for land strikes against alleged Venezuelan drug traffickers

President Donald Trump on Thursday touted the extrajudicial killings of at least 37 alleged drug smugglers from Venezuela that he has authorized over the past month, adding that he may soon expand his attacks onto land.

In a White House press conference, he said he was not sure if he would seek approval from Congress for land attacks against the South American nation. When asked by a reporter why he would not ask Congress for a declaration of war, Trump said, "I think we're just gonna kill people. Okay? We're gonna kill them. They're gonna be, like, dead."

"The land is going to be next," Trump added. "And we may go to the Senate; we may go to the Congress and tell them about it, but I can't imagine they'd have any problem with it."

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The U.S. military killed three people on Wednesday in the eastern Pacific Ocean, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said, expanding the Trump administration's campaign against drug trafficking in South America.

It followed another strike Tuesday night, also in the eastern Pacific, that killed two people, Hegseth posted on social media hours earlier. The attacks were departures from the seven previous U.S. strikes that had targeted vessels in the Caribbean Sea, according to The Associated Press.

The strikes represent an expansion of the military's targeting area as well as a shift to the waters off South America where much of the cocaine from the world's largest producers is smuggled. Hegseth's social media posts also drew a direct comparison between the war on terrorism that the U.S. declared after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the Trump administration's crackdown, according to The Associated Press.

"Just as Al Qaeda waged war on our homeland, these cartels are waging war on our border and our people," Hegseth said, adding "there will be no refuge or forgiveness - only justice."

His comparison between the alleged cartel boats and the most significant terror attack on U.S. soil comes amid an administration-wide effort to characterize Democratic-led American cities as bastions of violent crime; protestors opposed to Trump as anti-American terrorist networks; and large swaths of undocumented immigrants as "criminal illegal aliens."

Some analysts have posited that the Trump administration's attacks on alleged smugglers are a pretext for its attempts to oust President Nicolás Maduro, who Trump called a "narco-terrorist," according to The Guardian.

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Trump denied reporting from the Wall Street Journal on Thursday that found the U.S. flew Air Force B-1 bombers near Venezuela earlier in the day.

Democrats and Republicans alike have expressed alarm at the Trump administration's circumvention of Congress in attacking members of a foreign nation.

"Now we're flying B-52s along the coast of Venezuela, talking about regime change?" Sen. Mark Kelly said on MSNBC on Thursday.

"How often has regime change worked out well for the United States, whether it's in Vietnam, Cuba, Iraq or Afghanistan? It puts American lives at risk, and this is not making us more safe. It's having the opposite effect."

Trump's comments on Thursday follow his accusations against the Nobel Committee of putting "politics over peace" in awarding a Peace Prize to a Venezuelan pro-democracy activist.