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Briefing|President Trump’s War on Cartels
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/03/briefing/president-trumps-war-on-cartels.html
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Good morning. It’s the third day of a shutdown of the federal government. And President Trump isn’t wasting a crisis. He called it an “unprecedented opportunity” to enact sweeping cuts to agencies and to halt billions of dollars in funds to states run by Democrats. He’s now using federal websites and workers to wage political attacks.
Trump is also focused on his enemies abroad. We spent yesterday looking into a confidential notice Trump sent Congress this week saying that the U.S. was formally engaged in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels that the administration has labeled terrorist organizations. The notice comes after three military strikes the president ordered on boats in the waters near Venezuela last month, which killed 17 people.
More on that is below. But first, the latest news:
Stabbings: British officials declared an attack on synagogue in Manchester, England, that killed two people to be an act of terrorism. It came on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar.
Anglicans: The Church of England announced that a woman, Sarah Mullally, would become archbishop, a first in the religion’s more-than-1,400-year history.
Sean Combs: The music mogul will face sentencing for two prostitution-related convictions this morning. He asked the judge for leniency.
Taylor Swift: Her new album, “Life of a Showgirl,” dropped overnight.
War powers
How is it that the U.S. has quietly started a war with Venezuela’s gangs? Let’s look at how we got here.
Trump has been building to this for months.
In July, he signed a directive ordering the Pentagon to use military force against some Latin American drug cartels. Around the same time, the administration declared that a Venezuelan criminal group was a terrorist organization and that Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, was its leader, setting up a possible justification for a conflict.
By late summer, the U.S. was amassing an armada. At the time, my colleague Eric Schmitt wrote, the military had deployed eight warships, several Navy P-8 surveillance planes and one attack submarine to the southern Caribbean Sea.
