Vice President JD Vance is under fire for joking about the U.S. Department of Defense’s deadly strikes on several boats the Trump administration insists were smuggling drugs headed for the United States, despite claims by their government to the contrary. Some have suggested the strikes might be illegal.

Democratic and Republican U.S. Senators and human rights groups have expressed concerns.

“Let us be clear — this may be an extrajudicial execution, which is murder,” Amnesty International’s Daphne Eviatar told NPR. “There is absolutely no legal justification for this military strike.”

But on Wednesday, the Vice President disregarded any concerns as he relayed a conversation with the Defense Secretary.

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“I was talking to Secretary Hegseth, and you know what he said? He said, ‘You know what, Mr. Vice President, we don’t see any of these drug boats coming into our country. They’ve completely stopped.'”

“And I said, ‘I know why. I would stop too. Hell, I wouldn’t go fishing right now in that area of the world.'”

The Vice President insisted that the killings of suspected drug smugglers are what should happen when “we just have our actual government fighting for the interests of Americans and nobody else.”

He claimed by doing so, “we can make this country safer, we can protect your jobs, we can make sure you’ve got the best wages anywhere in the world, and we can stop this terrible poison from coming into our country.”

Critics blasted the Vice President.

Veteran journalist John Harwood took the opportunity to call the Vice President “depraved.”

WUWM radio’s Joy Powers commented, “The Vice President of the United States is joking about murdering innocent people. Should someone call his employer?”

“There are actual fishermen in that area of world worried the United States is going to idiotically kill them,” noted Mother Jones’ Dan Friedman.

“Get it? The joke is that we might kill some totally innocent people! Haha that’s funny, right?” said attorney Aaron Reichlin-Melnick in a sarcastic remark.

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“Literally bragging that there’s a real chance we’re murdering innocent people,” wrote film producer Franklin Leonard.

“Nothing like a joke about US potentially murdering innocent people. Ha ha,” remarked Ron Filipkowski, an attorney and editor-in-chief of MeidasTouch News.

“Vance has a law degree, he will not be able to escape responsibility for this,” wrote former Republican and past trial lawyer John Jackson, calling Vance’s remarks “Sickening.”

“He thinks it’s funny that we threaten poor fisherman in a third-world country. This will be an exhibit in a court one day,” Jackson added.

“When JD Vance brags about the U.S. blowing up alleged drug boats and says, ‘I wouldn’t go fishing right now in that area of the world,’ he’s really saying: ‘We’re so reckless and dishonest that fishermen should worry that the U.S. will murder them and then falsely accuse them of drug trafficking,'” commented Mark Jacob, an author and former Chicago Tribune editor.

“In addition to everything else that’s reprehensible about this ‘joke’ about ‘accidentally’ murdering poor fishermen, don’t forget that Trump made this same ‘joke’ as well, so JD is also debasing himself by mindlessly mimicking Trump’s degeneracy,” remarked The New Republic’s Greg Sargent.

Vance on Trump's strikes on boats: "I wouldn't go fishing right now in that area of the world." pic.twitter.com/YdXmvCkV2B

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 17, 2025

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Image via Reuters

A House Democratic lawmaker blasted the right’s narrative that extremist violence comes largely — or exclusively — from the left, a claim contradicted by evidence, including a Justice Department study recently scrubbed from its website. The motive and political ideology of the shooter remain largely unknown.

President Donald Trump has been leading the charge on the right in suggesting that left-wing violence is prevalent.

“For years,” Trump said in an address from the Oval Office the night of Charlie Kirk’s killing, “those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans, like Charlie, to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.”

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White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller on Monday declared there is “a vast domestic terror movement,” CNBC reported, noting that he was specifically “speaking of left-wing political organizations.”

“With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people,” Miller also said. “It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie’s name.”

Attorney General Pam Bondi on Monday declared, “Yes, who killed Charlie [Kirk]? Left-wing radicals. And they will be held accountable.”

U.S. Rep. Jared Moskowitz on Wednesday tore into House Republicans.

“I want to caution my colleagues on, you know, one-sided violence in this country,” the Florida Democrat began.

“We just heard that there were no riots on the right. We’re literally sitting in the building where there was a giant riot by supporters of the president, the right,” he said, referring to the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, which many have deemed an insurrection.

“We also heard that only leftists have said that Trump is a ‘Nazi.’ In 2016, the current Vice President of the United States said, ‘Trump is either a cynical a– or he’s America’s Hitler’.”

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Moskowitz lamented having to “say this garbage. But you want me to sit here and get painted with one brush—the whole left. No, no, there are extremes on the left, and there are extremes on the right. And we collectively should tackle that.”

“But to come here and just look at us and say, ‘we all support what’s going on in the extremes,’ is why we can’t solve anything in this building.”

On Wednesday, NBC News reported that Miller’s “suggestion that a secret network of violent left-wing extremists was behind the killing” of Charlie Kirk, “stands in contrast to the evidence that law enforcement officials presented on Tuesday in Utah, where Kirk was fatally shot. There was no indication presented Tuesday that the suspect, Tyler Robinson, was a member of a group or that he fell under the sway of a particular leader. The investigation is ongoing.”

On Monday, as The New York Times reported, President Trump, “who has downplayed violence from right-wing or other supporters, said that he would like to designate a range of groups, including the loosely affiliated group of far-left anti-fascism activists, known as ‘antifa,’ as domestic terrorists and bring racketeering cases against people funding protests.”

The Times added that “other officials, from Vice President JD Vance on down, made it clear on Monday that they believed that political violence was a liberal problem and not a conservative one,” and announced “that they would be cracking down on what they called leftist nongovernmental organizations, and that they would use every available lever of the federal government to do so.”

“We just heard that there were no riots on the right. We’re literally sitting in the building where there was a giant riot by supporters of the president, the right,” Rep. Jared Moskowitz said.pic.twitter.com/tWgJKMOo61

— David Badash (@davidbadash) September 17, 2025

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Many of the Latino voters who ran to Donald Trump, helping him win the 2024 election, now say they regret their vote. Trump’s approval rating among Latino and Hispanic voters is now underwater by 23 points, according to a poll by Somos Votantes and the Global Strategy Group, and he is “bleeding” Latino voters, according to The Bulwark, which hosted a focus group last week.

Newsweek reported that the poll results “closely mirrored a CNN survey last week showing similar declines in Trump’s approval among Hispanic voters. The latest Cygnal survey, conducted August 7-9 also showed Trump’s favorability with Hispanics has dropped significantly over the summer.”

The Bulwark reported that for their focus group members, “Every single one of the seven participants said they regretted voting for Trump.”

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“The participants said they were angry over the state of the economy and frustrated by Trump’s handling of immigration and deportations,” The Bulwark’s Adrian Carrasquillo reported. “Asked to give the president a letter grade for his term thus far, six gave him D’s and one gave an F. Asked later about her grade, one participant who gave a D said she was just trying to be nice.”

While the tangible, measurable effects of the Trump economy appear to weigh heavily on some of the participants, several “painted a picture of a nation struggling to grapple with a darker blend of politics and open divisiveness from its leaders.”

“I think a lot of people are a lot more hateful, they feel they can be a lot more open about it, because they see it everywhere so much that no one is really trying to be nice and get along and respect differences,” a participant, from Colorado said. “They think it’s okay to pass their judgments and stereotypes willy-nilly because no one does anything about it, because they see the people in control doing it.”

Another participant said, “I live in America, I don’t want to be in a dictatorship. I still want to be in a democratic nation that has rules, has regulations. . . . This is America, we gotta treat people with respect and dignity and I think a lot of that has gone out the window.”

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Still another called Trump “super-extremist” and accused him of “ignoring history.”

“He’s taking down government history websites, he’s changing [the Department of Defense] to the Department of War. It seems that power has taken control of his mind where he thinks he can change the Constitution and control the entire country by himself.”

But the participants’ anti-Trump sentiment should not lead Democratic supporters to rejoice.

“While every single member of the focus group said they regretted their vote, none said they would back Kamala Harris in a hypothetical election rerun. Instead, they all said they would support a third party candidate or stay home.”

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