The Math of Murder

How Trump’s Caribbean kill doctrine masks the real forces killing Americans, and the living world

The Trump administration’s new Caribbean war doctrine rests on a simple story: small fiberglass fishing boats, skimming along the turquoise waters between Venezuela and Trinidad, are killing more Americans each year than heart disease, cancer, and Big Oil combined. At least that’s the implication when Donald Trump insists each destroyed vessel saves “25,000 to 45,000 American lives,” or when Pete Hegseth, Secretary of the newly rebranded Department of War, assures the country that “hundreds of thousands” of Americans are being killed by drugs trafficked on those boats. It’s a neat moral equation. A justification, even. And it glosses over the execution of shipwreck survivors as though it were as banal as fishing a plastic bottle out of the sea.

But like so much in this administration’s worldview, the story collapses upon contact with arithmetic.

Start with the bodies. Actual U.S. overdose deaths have been catastrophic for years, but they are not the figures Trump and Hegseth invoke with the swagger of men who assume no one will check. The CDC’s numbers tell the real story: around 110,000 overdose deaths at the 2022–2023 peak, now down to roughly 80,000 in the most recent twelve-month period. Fentanyl accounts for the majority, a grim and complex crisis shaped by pain, prohibition, medical abandonment, and a drug market that behaves nothing like the tidy cartoon of “terrorist boats” Washington now claims it must destroy.