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

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

U.S. military forces have conducted multiple strikes against vessels engaged in running drugs since Sept. 2, when forces sank a boat carrying 11 members of the Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua (TdA), which Trump declared as a foreign terrorist organization on Jan. 20, 2025. Maddow claimed that the Trump administration was trying to “reverse-engineer” a reason for war, telling “Deadline: White House” host Nicolle Wallace drug trafficking was the pretext.

“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 in terms of explaining why Trump has proclaimed that we are at war with Venezuela,” Maddow said. “My sense is that they wanted to use the Alien Enemies Act to illegally deport people, arrest and deport people from this country that actually weren’t subject to deportation.”

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

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

“What are we doing there in the first place?” Maddow said. “Why are we blowing out of the water and killing people in boats with outboard motors, some of which aren’t even pointed towards the United States, let alone verified to have drugs on them, let alone — even if they did, if they were coming to the United States and they had the capacity to reach the United States, and they were filled with drugs, why isn’t it possible to just interdict them the way that we do with the Coast Guard, where you go and take the drugs and then put those people on trial and investigate and then follow the drugs to their source of origin and then take care of it there?”

“It feels like they bumbled themselves into a profoundly incoherent and illegal situation in which they decided the one true benefit they were getting out of all of it is that they were getting video game-style visuals to play on Fox News and put on TikTok, and they liked that,” Maddow continued. “So now they have put this admiral, the commander of Southern Command, every senior officer in that command, and all of the service men and women who served there in the position of potentially being held liable for murder or war crimes until the statute of limitations on those matters runs.”

The Senate defeated a resolution disapproving the strikes under the War Powers Act by a 51-49 vote on Nov. 13.

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