Near the end of his second term as president in September 1796, George Washington had a letter published that was addressed to “the PEOPLE of the United States.” The letter would become known as Washington’s Farewell Address. The first several paragraphs of Washington’s letter were devoted to denouncing excessive partisanship and encouraging national unity. Washington was strongly opposed to political parties that pursued rigid ideological agendas. Such factional groups, seen by many at the time as an artifact of English corruption, seemed very often oblivious to the advantages of compromise and cooperation.

A number of our nation’s founders disapproved of political parties and the irrational partisanship that often accompanies them. Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson wrote most forcefully against the influence of parties. As Jefferson quipped, “If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.”

Despite the view of our Founders, today we can see a multitude of examples where partisanship—thinking and behaving as if members of a threatened tribe—has induced people to behave in irrational ways and to believe implausible claims. Let us examine just one example of how partisanship has induced at least a third of Americans to accept murder as a legitimate activity of government. As candidate Trump declared before his 2016 election, “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” Trump’s claim was evidently more accurate than even he could have imagined.

Some might sight the killings of Alex Petti and Renee Good by ICE and Border Patrol agents in Minnesota, and Trump’s justice Department’s refusal to even investigate those incidents, much less consider bringing charges. Objective observers can plainly see that those killings were not justified. But those cases would not likely rise to the level of first degree murder. There are other instances, however, where the Trump Administration has repeatedly committed first degree murder while most of the populous has been more concerned about the price of groceries and gasoline.

On September 2nd, 2025, the Trump Administration first announced a lethal missile strike on an alleged drug-smuggling vessel in the Caribbean Sea. As of September 2026, more than 220 people who were alleged to be running drugs had been deliberately killed. In at least one case, an initial strike destroyed the vessel but two men survived the explosion and were clinging to debris. So a second strike was ordered to kill the two men, in direct contravention of International Law and The Department of Defense’s Law of War Manuel.

The Trump Administration said the killings were justified because the men were “narco-terrorists,” without offering any evidence the men were actually carrying drugs. And, of course, in order for those men to be terrorists, we would have to change the definition of “terrorism.” Terrorism is “the deliberate use of fear and violence against civilians or property to force a change in society or government policy.” Those men, if they were carrying drugs, were simply delivering a sought-after commodity—probably cocaine destined for Europe. (Not fentanyl destined for the United States, as Trump claimed.) They obviously had no interest in instilling fear or committing violence against anyone. If they were running drugs, it would be to earn a little more than they could earn fishing.

It is not as if we are incapable of stopping those boats to see what they are carrying and to arrest them if it is illicit drugs. The United States Coast Guard has been doing that for decades. Even if the men were in fact carrying drugs, such behavior is not a capital crime. President Trump, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio simply wanted to kill those men to make a political statement—to use murder to instill fear and to affect cultural and political outcomes. That’s why they put it on television. And that, of course, is the very definition of terrorism.

And yet, willful blindness has enabled about a third of Americans to continue believing President Trump is doing a great job.