If We Are Descending Into Fascism, This Little-Noticed Moment Will Prove Pivotal

Sign up for the Slatest^[1] to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.

If and when historians write the tale of how our country devolved into a boastfully lawless state, unashamedly insensitive to matters of human life, they might note the remarks of Vice President J.D. Vance^[2] at a factory in Michigan on Sept. 17, 2025, as a key moment in the decline.

Vance was there to tout President Donald Trump’s widely unpopular budget bill, but he took a moment to tout the U.S. military’s recent bull’s-eye bombing of three boats in the Caribbean allegedly carrying narcotics to our shores. Vance claimed that all drug trafficking in those waters had since stopped, chortling, “I would stop, too—hell, I wouldn’t go fishin’ right now in that part of the world.”

Some in the audience chuckled. Were others appalled? They should have been. Much of the rest of the world, no doubt, slacked its collective jaw, and many American servicemen and servicewomen must have been ashamed.

The vice president of the United States was celebrating an act of murder in international waters for which there was no legal authority, historical precedent, or clear and present danger that might have justified taking a shot. Even John Yoo, who defended the legality of torture during George W. Bush’s presidency, has said the bombing of the boats was illegal, even if they were manned by drug smugglers, a claim that hasn’t been proved. When Vance was asked about the operation’s legality, he replied, “I don’t give a shit.”^[3][4]

Vance was also, in effect, portraying the American military personnel who sank the boats as trigger-happy, prone to mistake a fishing boat for a drug vessel and feeling guiltless about doing so.

Finally, he was wrong in saying that drug trafficking off our shores had since ceased, so terrified were these criminals by the prospect of drawing similar fire. In fact, just this past Monday, two days before Vance’s speech and a few days after the first sinking, the U.S. Coast Guard seized the largest haul of narcotics in Coast Guard history^[5]—76,140 pounds’ worth, having a value of $473 million and the potential to cause 23 million lethal doses—in 19 interdictions in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific.

The Coast Guard crews did this not by killing anyone but rather by stopping the boats (in some cases, shooting at the engines), then boarding them, and arresting the smugglers. That is how they have been interdicting drug traffic for decades. In 2022, the most recent year for which there is complete data, they seized 150 metric tons^[7] (about 165 U.S. tons) of illegal narcotics that way.

Vance’s comments were merely piling on to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s celebration^[8] of the first boat’s bombing, during which all 11 people onboard were killed. “We smoked a drug boat, and there’s 11 narco-terrorists at the bottom of the ocean, and when other people try to do that, they’re going to meet the same fate,” the top civilian overseer of the U.S. armed forces and its nearly $1 trillion budget exclaimed of the unprecedented extrajudicial killings.

In similarly high spirits, Hegseth was all but bouncing with glee earlier this month, when Trump announced the name change of the Department of Defense to the Department of War. “We’re going to go on offense, not just on defense!” he said, standing next to the president. “Maximum lethality—not tepid legality! Violent effect, not politically correct!”^[9]

Have we ever had a secretary of defense so adept at looking and talking like the thuggish buffoon in an Armando Iannucci^[10] satire?

In real life, these spectacles aren’t so funny. Vance is the successor to the throne if Trump is unable to fulfill his duties. Hegseth is the main point of contact between the commander in chief in the White House and the combatant commanders at military bases around the world.

Hegseth’s touting of “maximum lethality” and trouncing of “tepid legality” is not merely an indulgence in cliché. The former Fox News anchor first came to Trump’s attention when he criticized the prosecution of three U.S. officers for hideous war crimes^[11] that they’d committed in Afghanistan. To Hegseth, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan as a major in the Army National Guard, the very term “war crimes” is an oxymoron. War is all about killing (“maximum lethality”); concerns about who a soldier might kill in the process is demoralizing woke (“tepid legality”).

For a glimpse of what professional active-duty senior U.S. officers, those with longtime combat experience, think of this attitude, look at the pained expression of Gen. Dan Caine^[12], the widely respected chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, while Hegseth goes on his rant.

We are led at the moment by a mélange of cynics, greenhorns, and opportunists (Vance once likened Trump to Hitler before he was invited to join the ticket^[13]), play-acting the roles of world leaders, not fully grasping their responsibilities or what it takes to perform them and claiming new and extraordinary powers—in a wide range of domestic^[14] and foreign policies—that have never been asserted before.

The world’s leaders—friends, foes, and those in between—keep a straight face at all this. The United States is still a powerful nation, and Trump is the one who controls its mighty levers. As the preeminent military strategist Lawrence Freedman^[19] recently described the situation, “Unserious president; serious country.” So, allies still depend on us for their security; adversaries try to butter up Trump and make him think they’re his friend, so he doesn’t get too upset when they do unsettling things. (When 19 Russian drones passed over Poland’s territory last week, prompting the Poles to call an emergency meeting under Article 4 of the North Atlantic Treaty, only the eighth time the article has been invoked in NATO’s 76-year history, Trump publicly said the overflights “could have been a mistake.”)

Still, many at home and abroad watch Trump and his team—listen to their words, analyze their actions—and, depending on whether they’re foe or friend, uncork the Champagne or pour themselves a stiff drink. How this plays out, what historians write a few decades from now, will depend on what the rest of us do in the coming months—how we vote and whether we succumb to pressures or resist them in the meantime.

Sign up for Slate’s evening newsletter.