America has a police problem.

On September 2, Donald Trump announced that the U.S. Navy had conducted an airstrike, not against any traditional military target, but against a small boat in international waters. As Secretary of State Marco Rubio made clear, “Instead of interdicting it, on the president’s orders, we blew it up. And it’ll happen again."

And it did.

Since then, three other boats have been hit with missiles fired from U.S. "Reaper" drones. It happened again this week, with four fresh deaths. Not only were these boats thousands of miles from the United States, but none of them were heading toward the United States. None of these craft were even capable of reaching the United States.

At one point, Vice President J.D. Vance joked, "I wouldn't go fishing right now."

According to Trump, these boats were crewed by the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua and were engaged in smuggling drugs. No evidence of those claims was presented. However, even if that were the case, this would represent the military directly attacking civilian craft for violation of laws, turning the military into the police.

In fact, it's far worse. Because these attacks took place in international waters far from the United States, the military acted to destroy boats that had not violated any U.S. laws. This is treating the military not as law enforcement, but as a pre-crime unit unanswerable to judges and not requiring any standard of evidence.

There is no doubt that drugs and drug cartels cause immense harm to the United States. However, Trump, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and other members of the administration consistently inflate the number of deaths by orders of magnitude. Destroying these boats and killing everyone aboard is not just morally and legally unjustifiable; it is also insanely dangerous. And to be clear, I mean dangerous to the United States.

This misuse of the military follows Trump's deployment of National Guard forces in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. — an action that has now been ruled illegal. Despite this, Trump made it clear in his jaw-dropping speech to assembled military leaders that he intends to keep using military forces inside the United States to punish cities and states that dare to elect leaders who oppose his rule.

Trump followed up by ordering the National Guard to Portland, Oregon over the objections of the mayor, governor, and citizens.

In a Truth Social post, Trump wrote: “The Governor of Oregon must be living in a ‘Dream World,’ Portland is a NEVER-ENDING DISASTER. Many people have been badly hurt, and even killed. It is run like a Third World Country.”

Then Trump followed up with an appearance on NBC News in which he confessed that his vision of Portland as a burning hellscape was defined by what he was being fed by his handlers.

“I spoke to the governor, she was very nice,” Trump said. “But I said, ‘Well wait a minute, am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening? My people tell me different.’ They are literally attacking and there are fires all over the place…it looks like terrible.”

But this momentary encounter with reality was soon brushed aside by Trump's caretakers. By the time Trump made his appearance at Hegseth's lecture against "beardos" in the military, he was once again fully immersed in his dark fantasy realm.

Of course, Trump is using the military assault on Portland as part of his ongoing effort to simply punish any person, group, city, or state who dares not adore him. But this use of the military goes far beyond already egregious actions like cutting off transportation funds or giving away public lands.

What's happening in America is an overt merger of the military and the police. Such mergers are characteristic of authoritarian governments known simply as "police states." In a police state, political power, policing authority, and military action have no clear boundaries.

America is a police state.

That America is now in this category is clear from actions such as Trump's public call for the prosecution of former FBI Director James Comey and other perceived opponents. It's clear from how masked ICE agents are free to act without warrants and assault anyone without consequence. It's clear from Trump's sending National Guard forces into multiple cities with orders that are clearly in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. It's clear from how both migrants and citizens are being shipped overseas into slavery.

Political. Police. Military. Those boundaries have been erased. And, as the Supreme Court repeatedly makes clear, it intends to put back the lines.

On multiple occasions, citizens seem shocked to find that, rather than helping to protect them from federal abuses of power, their own police departments have sided with ICE, even if that means clearing the way for ICE vehicles to drive into crowds or joining in on abusing peaceful protestors.

No one should be surprised. Police love police states. They always have.

The Nazi state alleviated many of the frustrations the police experienced in the Weimar Republic. The Nazis shielded the police from public criticism by censoring the press. … The Nazis centralized and fully funded the police to better combat criminal gangs and promote state security. The Nazi state increased staff and training, and modernized police equipment. The Nazis offered the police the broadest latitude in arrests, incarceration, and the treatment of prisoners. The police moved to take “preventive action,” that is, to make arrests without the evidence required for a conviction in court and indeed without court supervision at all.

This didn't just happen in Nazi Germany. Increased police authority and reduced civilian oversight are signatures of authoritarian government. Authoritarians are far more concerned with "order" than "law," and they are happy to set the police free from constraints so long as they aim their truncheons at unruly citizens.

Police are more than ready for this moment. For decades, America has been pouring countless billions into the militarization of police departments. It started with the first SWAT teams being created out of open racism. It's been fed by both Democratic and Republican administrations that have sent military hardware to civilian police. It's been nurtured by the culture of the "warrior cop." Even small town police departments are now likely to hold equipment suitable for fighting a mid-sized war. And they've been aching, positively aching, to show it off.

Americans haven't moved in disgust as the police donned hardened black armor and adopted an attitude of ruling rather than serving. They've cheered it on.

The National Police Organization puts its finger on one of the principal reasons.

The headlines would lead the average citizens to believe that the population of our country has collectively developed an adversarial relationship with its police. Television ratings show just the opposite. Americans are fascinated by the police.

Television is—and has been for decades—the high church of police sanctification. According to the Hollywood Reporter, television is so utterly dependent on showing us patrol officers, undercover police, detectives, military police, military police detectives, and undercover military police detectives that they don't know what else to do.

“They normalize excessive force in a way that’s glamorized, they normalize violations of the Constitution and surveillance in a way that’s glamorized,” said Arisha Hatch, vp and chief of campaigns for advocacy group Color of Change.

Roughly half of all scripted dramas in the United States are police shows. And the police are the heroes in every one of them.

Watching those shows leads viewers to believe that the police are fairer, more honest, and more effective than in reality. For the sake of drama, they hugely inflate the dangers that police face. They also routinely justify police beatings and falsifying evidence because, in these fictional series, it's always clear that the police are the good guys, and their actions are being frustrated by the interference of silly laws and lawyers.

Even in a relatively lightweight show like The Rookie, a show centered around a good-natured man who dedicates himself to becoming a police officer later in life, every traffic stop features officers being fired at with machine guns, serious criminals are routinely protected by the intervention of a gleefullly evil defense lawyer, and even rookie police officers routinely break both U.S. and international law to Do The Right Thing. Sometimes while using a rocket launcher.

Every non-police person in these shows is either a violent criminal or ditheringly ignorant of how the police are throwing themselves on the line to keep their daily lives intact. The police aren't just heroes, they're unflinching saviors. Little short of gods.

None of this means that the ranks of the police aren't filled with many well-meaning people who enter its ranks explicitly to do genuine good. It's just that the profession they enter teaches them to treat their fellow citizens as lesser and their authority as unlimited.

No country in the history of the world has been better prepared for becoming a police state than America. If Donald Trump lives in a media bubble carefully prepared by his handlers to generate authoritarian actions, the rest of us live in a bubble in which we've been taught that the only acceptable attitude toward both the police and the military is seldom less than worshipful.

America has become a police state from both directions. Part of it is Trump pushing the military down into roles of civilian policing. Part of it is decades of police developing a culture and procedures better suited to capturing an enemy outpost than assisting their own communities. All of this is made far worse by a media that's taught us to elevate public servants into figures of worship.

For everyone's sake, we have to dismantle this problem in both directions. The lines that prevent military troops from being used in domestic law enforcement need to be underscored. The rules that allow police to cloak themselves in military hardware need to be ended. Every "assault squad," right back to the first SWAT team, needs to be disassembled.

Both law and order are important, but any nation that doesn't value the first above the second is on a path to destruction that no amount of body armor and armored vehicles can reverse.