CBS released the full transcript of Norah O’Donnell’s interview with President Trump for the television show “60 Minutes” on Nov. 2. As he often does, the president made up numbers that have no basis in reality and pretended they are facts.

This is one example of a statement he made in the “60 Minutes” interview regarding the United States military blowing up boats in the Caribbean: “Every single boat that you see that’s shot down kills 25,000 on drugs and destroys families all over our country.” This year there have been at least 12 boats bombed by our military. Using the president’s numbers, he has saved 300,000 American lives from drug overdoses (12 x 25,000).

This is impossible. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention an estimated 80,391 people died from drug overdoses in 2024, not 300,000. If he wanted to stop all the drug overdoses, according to his logic, he would have had to bomb only 3-4 boats, not 12.

The president’s assertion that bombing boats in the Caribbean is stopping drug overdoses is nonsense because drug runners in the Caribbean are usually carrying drugs like cocaine that are not generally responsible for drug overdoses in the United States. Also, we know that drug overdoses did not end in our country after the boats were bombed.

We don’t know if any of the boats were carrying any drugs. They may have been fishing boats. Our government has not provided any names of people they killed or any evidence to support the idea that there were drugs on board. In the past, it was the job of the U.S. Coast Guard to stop boats, confiscate the evidence that drugs were on board and bring the people on the boats into the court system with due process to determine whether they committed a crime.

Summarily executing people without a trial to determine their innocence or guilt goes against everything in our constitution and international law. Trump justifies these actions by using his well-worn tactic of declaring something an emergency that gives him the right to do anything he wants to do. He also declared drug cartels “foreign terrorist organizations,” a classification that he uses to justify killing people without due process.

If he can get away with this, then he can try to do the same thing here at home. He has already told us that he will give protesters who disagree with him a label that has no legal standing, like “antifa” or “domestic terrorist organizations.” He has already told us that National Guard units in several states are being armed and trained to use force against our citizens. He has already told us that he plans to send the military to cities under the guise of some emergency that he will make up.