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Trump said the boats were carrying fentanyl during the Oct. 15 press conference.

"And you can see it, the boats get hit, and you see that fentanyl all over the ocean," Trump said. "It's like floating in bags. It's all over the place."

He has shared aerial videos of some of the boat strikes on Truth Social, and no bags of drugs are visible in the videos.

Additionally, most illicit fentanyl in the U.S. comes from Mexico, not Venezuela. It enters the U.S. mainly through the southern border at official ports of entry, and it's smuggled in mostly by U.S. citizens, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission.

...In August, however, the hard-liners began to win out, according to someone with knowledge of the Administration’s internal deliberations. The shift seemed to mark a victory for Rubio. But the change didn’t reflect Rubio’s influence so much as the involvement of a new player in the policy fight: Stephen Miller, the President’s deputy chief of staff and the head of the White House Homeland Security Council. “Miller sided with Rubio not because of regime change,” the source told me. Rather, it was because Venezuela presented “an outlet for the belief that the President can just kill these guys” as part of an open-ended war on drugs and crime. “Stephen is a lot of the energy behind the bombings,” the source said. “He is owning the Western Hemisphere portfolio: immigration, security issues, and going after the cartels. He convenes working groups almost every day. He’s been very top-down with the Department of Defense about what he wants to see. Hegseth’s team just says ‘yes.’ They don’t push back. Miller got told no for similar stuff in the first term. He doesn’t have people there to say ‘No, this isn’t a good idea’ anymore.”

For Miller, the military strikes help expand the President’s power, while also reinforcing the narrative of Venezuelan immigrants as “alien enemies.” As a former Trump Administration official put it, “this just feels like the militarization of domestic policy. How do you stay in power? You create an ‘other.’ You say that we’re under attack. You create a casus belli. You blame the other for everything. This is happening while you have the deployment of National Guardsmen to cities. You’re getting people used to these kinds of actions. This is expanding the definition of the use of force.”

The implications of Trump’s use of the military, the former White House official said, are not lost on other Latin American countries, either. “If you’re Panama, you think this is about you. If you’re Colombia, you think it’s about you,” he told me. “You prove to the Mexicans that you’ll do what you say. The Brazilians thought this was about them. If you think it’s a signal, it is a signal.”....