Your first great love story is free when you sign up for a free 30-day trial at audible.co.

That's audible.co.uk slash wondery.

When the court says Trump is above the law, who protects the 11 dead on that boat?

When the court says Trump is above the law, who speaks for the 11 dead on that boat?

Their lives ended not in a battlefield crossfire or a clash between nations, but at the

whim of one man emboldened by six justices who declared him untouchable.

Trump simply ordered human beings erased, confident the court had given him

immunity from any consequence, and the leaders of his majority would obey an illegal, excuse me,

his military would obey an illegal order. Eleven souls were sacrificed, not just to his cruelty,

but to a judicial betrayal that transformed the presidency into a license

to kill. For most of our history, American presidents have at least gone through the motions

of cloaking lethal force in some form of legal justification. Abraham Lincoln suspended

habeas corpus during the Civil War but sought Lincoln's

or Congress's approval. Franklin Roosevelt went to Congress for lend lease before escalating aid to

Britain and sought a declaration of war against Japan. George W. Bush and Barack Obama leaned

heavily on the post-11 authorization for use of military force to justify everything from

Afghanistan to drone strikes in Yemen and Somalia. The principle has always been that the United

States has not simply killed people without some kind of legal process. It may be stretched,

it may be abused, but it has been invoked.

What Donald Trump has now done with the strike on a small boat off Venezuela's coast is to break that tradition in a way that is both lawless and unprecedented.

He gave the order to kill 11 human beings with no congressional approval, no international

authorization, and no visible evidence justifying it.

...