In a recent appearance on CNN, right-wing pundit Batya Ungar-Sargon defended the Trump administration’s policy of blowing up boats off the Venezuelan coast that it claims are carrying drugs. “Secretary of State Rubio has determined that these boats are carrying terrorists,” she said, “which makes the attacks on them legal.”

The idea that the executive branch can wave away all legal, moral, and constitutional obstacles to doing what it pleases by saying the magic word “terrorism” has been a depressingly standard one in recent American history. Ungar-Sargon’s framing on this point is basically indistinguishable from the kind of thing a bowtie-wearing conservative might have said in 2005 to justify the Bush administration’s policy of “enhanced interrogation” at Guantanamo Bay. But she followed it up with an attempt to give the Trump administration’s lawlessness a “populist” twist:

When working-class Americans in those forgotten Rust Belt communities where you have five kids who’ve overdosed and died, when they see him blowing up those boats, they feel like he sees their pain. They feel like somebody cares.