In defending his administration’s decision to carry out lethal strikes on suspected drug-smuggling boats and to intensify pressure on Venezuela, President Trump has repeatedly relied on claims that blur facts, contradict one another, and stretch legal language well beyond its accepted meaning.

The president has argued that an “armed conflict” exists, making the killing of people aboard these vessels lawful. However, experts in the law of armed conflict say the basic legal threshold for a war has not been met. The administration has also treated a Venezuelan slang phrase, “Cartel de los Soles,” as if it were a formal criminal organization, while redefining narcotics as a “weapon” and drug trafficking as an act of “terrorism.”

At the heart of the administration’s justification for using military force is the devastating toll of fentanyl overdoses in the United States, most of which are linked to drugs entering from Mexico. Yet the boats being targeted are suspected of transporting cocaine from South America. The administration portrays alleged drug involvement by Venezuela’s president as unacceptable, while President Trump has pardoned a former Honduran president who was convicted in a U.S. court of conspiring to traffic cocaine on a massive scale.

Mr. Trump has a well-documented history of making false or misleading statements. Still, the concentration of disputed claims surrounding the naval strikes and the broader Venezuela campaign stands out even by his own standards.

The current approach began to take shape in February, when Secretary of State Marco Rubio, acting on Mr. Trump’s orders, labeled eight Latin American criminal organizations as terrorist groups. Among them was Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan prison gang. Since then, administration officials have consistently referred to these groups and their suspected members as “narco-terrorists.”

In ordinary usage, terrorism refers to violence carried out for ideological, political, or religious purposes. Drug cartels, by contrast, operate as profit-driven criminal enterprises that supply illegal goods despite government prohibitions. Conflating the two changes the legal and moral framework in which the problem is understood.

In March, President Trump claimed he could use a wartime deportation statute to summarily expel Venezuelans suspected of belonging to Tren de Aragua, sending them to a notorious prison in El Salvador. He justified this by asserting that Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro was directing the gang as part of an “invasion” of the United States.

U.S. intelligence agencies, however, have reached the opposite conclusion. Their assessments indicate that the gang is not controlled by Mr. Maduro, has conflicts with the Venezuelan government, and lacks the structure needed to carry out coordinated orders. Federal courts said they could not challenge the president’s claim that the gang was linked to a foreign government, but they ruled that illegal immigration does not constitute a wartime invasion, making the deportation law inapplicable.

In July, the Treasury Department formally designated “Cartel de los Soles” as a terrorist organization and named Mr. Maduro as its leader, a move later mirrored by the State Department. As a result, administration officials now routinely describe Mr. Maduro as a cartel boss.

Yet “Cartel de los Soles” is not an actual cartel. The term emerged in the 1990s as Venezuelan slang referring to military officers accused of accepting bribes from traffickers. It functions as a critical label for corruption within the state, not as the name of a structured drug organization.

That same month, President Trump issued an order to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, whom the administration refers to as the “secretary of war,” directing the military to begin using lethal force against cartel-linked drug-smuggling boats in international waters.

On September 2, the military carried out its first such strike. The targeted vessel carried 11 people whom Mr. Trump described as members of Tren de Aragua. A video released by the president portrayed the strike as swift and decisive.

Mr. Trump later told Congress the attack was an act of self-defense. Subsequent information, however, revealed that the boat had been heading toward a route commonly associated with transshipment to Europe and had turned back after encountering a military aircraft, raising doubts about any immediate threat.

Further details showed that more than one strike was carried out. A second attack killed two men who had survived the initial blast. They had climbed onto the overturned hull and were seen waving as a surveillance plane circled overhead before a second strike was ordered. Under the laws of war, even during armed conflict, killing shipwrecked individuals who are no longer participating in hostilities constitutes a war crime.

In briefings to Congress, the admiral overseeing the operation reportedly justified the second strike by suggesting the men might have been communicating with other “narco-terrorists.” He later acknowledged that no other boats were nearby and that there was no evidence the men had radios. He also argued that cocaine might still have been hidden beneath the hull, meaning that what the administration labeled a “weapon” remained present.

In mid-September, the administration advanced another legal argument. The president’s counterterrorism adviser claimed that designating cartels as foreign terrorist organizations made the use of military force lawful. But the statute governing such designations is designed to block funding and support, not to authorize military attacks.

When that claim was challenged, officials began using a new label, “designated terrorist organizations,” or D.T.O.s, to describe groups whose suspected members could allegedly be lawfully killed. This term has no basis in U.S. law and appears to have been invented for the purpose.

After a second boat strike, the administration informed Congress that President Trump had determined the United States to be in a formal armed conflict with drug cartels, classifying boat crews as combatants rather than civilians.

Outside the administration, few experts in international humanitarian law agree with this reasoning. Civilians do not lose their protected status simply by committing crimes. Cocaine is an illegal drug, not a weapon, and selling it to willing consumers, while criminal, does not amount to an armed attack.

When pressed on how extrajudicial killings could be justified, administration officials pointed to the rise in overdose deaths over the past decade. Yet that surge, which began to slow after 2023, was driven largely by fentanyl, produced in Mexican laboratories using chemical precursors from China. The strikes, meanwhile, target boats suspected of carrying cocaine from South America, assuming the intelligence behind them is accurate.

The administration has also invoked the concept of collective self-defense, claiming the United States is acting on behalf of countries such as Colombia and Mexico, whose security forces sometimes clash with cartel gunmen. Under international law, however, collective self-defense requires a request from the affected nation. Instead of making such requests, the leaders of both countries have publicly criticized the strikes.

Another central argument for seeking Mr. Maduro’s removal from power is his 2020 indictment on charges of conspiring to export cocaine to the United States. Yet just weeks ago, President Trump pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, who was convicted last year of conspiring to export cocaine on a vast scale.

On December 15, Mr. Trump signed an executive order designating fentanyl as a “weapon of mass destruction.” The term has a specific legal definition, referring to chemical, biological, or radiological weapons, or explosives capable of causing mass casualties.

Last year, roughly 48,000 Americans died from overdoses involving fentanyl. These tragedies, however, occurred as individual incidents over time, not as a single mass casualty event as defined in law.

Most recently, President Trump declared on social media that U.S. naval forces near Venezuela would enforce a “total and complete blockade of all sanctioned oil vessels.” The word blockade carries serious implications, as it traditionally constitutes an act of war.

Legally, a blockade means preventing all vessels from entering or leaving an enemy’s ports. Threatening to intercept a limited number of already sanctioned tankers, while allowing other ships to pass freely, more closely resembles a law enforcement operation than a true blockade.

Taken together, the administration’s shifting language and legal interpretations reveal a pattern in which words are redefined to fit policy goals, raising profound questions about legality, accountability, and the long-term consequences of blurring the line between war and crime.