Rachel Maddow Spins New Conspiracy Theory About Drug Boat Strikes, Illegal Immigration

MS NOW host Rachel Maddow claimed Tuesday that President Donald Trump is launching strikes on drug boats to start a war with Venezuela in order to use the Foreign Enemies Act to deport Venezuelans.

U.S. military forces have carried out multiple strikes against ships involved in drug trafficking since September 2, when they sank a boat carrying 11 members of the Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua (TdA), which Trump declared a foreign terrorist organization on January 20, 2025. Maddow claimed the Trump administration was trying to “reverse engineer” a reason for war, saying the “Deadline: The White House,” Nicolle Wallace, drug trafficking was the pretext. (RELATED: White House Launches New ‘Biased’ Media Targeting and ‘Fake News’ Reporting)

“I don’t understand why we’re going to war with Venezuela, and I’m not sure the administration has even bothered to try to come up with anything, even internally, coherent as to why Trump has proclaimed we’re at war with Venezuela,” Maddow said. “I feel like they wanted to use the Enemy Alien Act to illegally deport people, arrest and remove people from this country who were actually not subject to deportation.”

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“They decided that the Alien Enemies Act was a way to do that,” Maddow continued. “They then realized that the Alien Enemies Act required a war, so they declared a war. Then they needed a reason for the war, so they then reverse engineered it to explain the war. Apparently, right now, the reason for the war is to stop drug trafficking into the United States.”

While liberals claim that the strikes on drug boats are illegal and constitute war crimes, Democratic Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, one of six Democrats who served in the military or intelligence agencies, who appeared in a video urging members of the military and intelligence agencies to ignore “unlawful” orders issued by Trump, was unable to cite an illegal order given by Trump when pressed by “This Week” host Martha Raddatz during a Nov. 23 appearance.

“What are we doing here in the first place?” » Maddow said. “Why are we blowing it out of the water and killing people in boats with outboard motors, some of which aren’t even headed to the United States, let alone verified as containing drugs, much less – even if they did, if they came to the United States and they had the ability to reach the United States, and they were full of drugs, why can’t it be banned like we are doing with the Coast Guard, where you’re going to take the drugs and then try these people and investigate and then track the drugs to their original source and then deal with them there?

“It’s like they got themselves into a deeply incoherent and illegal situation where they decided that the only real benefit they got out of all of this was being able to broadcast video game-style visuals on Fox News and put them on TikTok, and they liked it,” Maddow continued. “So now they have placed this admiral, the commander of Southern Command, every senior officer in that command, and every military man and woman who served there, in the position of potentially being held accountable for murder or war crimes until the statute of limitations runs out. (RELATED: Barack Obama Really Wants You to Believe the Mainstream Media is Right)

The Senate rejected a resolution disapproving strikes under the War Powers Act by 51 votes to 49 on November 13.

MS NOW hosts and guests regularly touted claims that President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign colluded with the Russian government to defeat Clinton and repeatedly aired then-Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff of California, who often made allegations about alleged collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia, on the air when the network was known as MSNBC. The network was rebranded in November 2025 after being separated from NBC.

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