A few weeks ago, your humble columnist took issue with the Trump administration’s legal rationale for the ongoing U.S. military campaign against drug traffickers in the southern Caribbean.

At that time, there was very little information to go on. President Donald Trump and his advisers generally kept their constitutional arguments close to the chest; when members of Congress asked for more information, the White House either demurred or delivered some generic case about why the president has the unilateral power to wage war against the cartels and anyone associated with them.

However, since that time, the Trump administration has gotten a bit more specific with their legal case. This comes as the U.S. military continues to strike boats allegedly transporting drugs in the Caribbean and the east Pacific Ocean. At the time of writing, 15 U.S. strikes have destroyed 16 vessels and killed 64 people. Some administration officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, have gone beyond the drug issue to focus on ousting Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, a man the White House depicts as so brutal, corrupt and threatening to U.S. interests in the Western Hemisphere that he must be deposed.

The good news is that lawmakers responsible for overseeing the various U.S. national security agencies are finally starting to get the details they’ve demanded. The bad news is that the Trump administration’s legal justification for the military campaign off the coasts of Venezuela and Colombia is shoddy at best and embarrassingly myopic at worst.

According to reports, the Office of Legal Counsel, the executive branch’s paramount legal office, is making a big claim: what the Trump administration is doing in the Caribbean does not technically meet the definition of “hostilities” in the War Powers Resolution, the 1973 law that governs the president’s use of force in situations where Congress has not approved a declaration of war.

In short, the administration is saying that the 1973 law doesn’t apply, which means the White House can skirt the 60-day timeline to which Trump normally would be beholden. Trump’s lawyers are also alleging that because most of the strikes are being undertaken by drones against targets that don’t have the capacity to shoot back, U.S. troops aren’t in harm’s way. Apparently a “war” isn’t really a war in the constitutional sense unless the enemy can shoot down a U.S. plane.

If this sounds familiar, that’s because it is. Barack Obama’s administration made a similar case to justify its 2011 military intervention against Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi. At that time, Obama’s lawyers stated that the War Powers Resolution was irrelevant since no U.S. ground forces were involved and because the risk of death to U.S. pilots dropping the bombs was extremely low. Similar to previous presidents, Trump is using the precedent established by his predecessors. The difference is that unlike Obama, George W. Bush or Bill Clinton, Trump’s military campaign is directed at killing people who have traditionally been treated as civilians under international law.

Unfortunately for Trump, his entire legal case falls apart when you factor in his administration’s own statements. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has been spending part of his days tweeting out how drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere are no better than al-Qaida and will be treated as the terrorists they truly are. Rubio is as emphatic on this point, referring to U.S. military action since early September as “a war on terrorists” who seek to destabilize the region and poison American society by sending drugs into the country. And in early October, the White House sent a notice to Congress explaining that the United States is prosecuting an “armed conflict” against cartels that are not only profiting from illegal activity but engaging in armed attacks against the United States.

You don’t have to be an expert in constitutional law or a graduate of Harvard Law School to recognize the discrepancy in messaging here. When it comes to public relations and policy, the Trump administration is all-in on the war framing, describing narcos as descendants of Osama bin Laden and blowing boats out of the water every other day. But when it involves the legal domain, apparently the very war Trump, Hegseth and Rubio are touting at every opportunity isn’t a war anymore. The public relations case is working at total cross-purposes with the legal case.

The United States is either in a war against narcotraffickers or it isn’t. There is no middle ground. And based on what the United States is doing to date — firing missiles into vessels, deploying the largest U.S. Navy presence in Latin America in more than 35 years and deliberating about plans to strike cartel and Venezuelan military targets on land — it’s hard, if not impossible, to deny with a straight face that a war of some kind is occurring. Given that Congress is scheduled to vote on a resolution to block any further U.S. military action in the Caribbean until Trump is given a formal authorization, a growing number of lawmakers appear to be coming to the same conclusion.

Trump has made the determination that further militarizing the decades-old “war on drugs” is both a political seller to his base and a smart policy move. By replacing arrests with bombs, the logic goes, drug traffickers who would normally ship their products to the American market will decide to get out of the business lest they find themselves on the receiving end of a Hellfire missile. You can either agree or disagree with this prescription on the merits.

But regardless of which side you’re on in the policy debate, surely all of us can agree that the president should follow the law and the U.S. Constitution?

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Daniel DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a foreign affairs columnist for the Chicago Tribune.

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