Fox News host Kennedy bashed the Trump administration’s lethal strikes on alleged drug smuggling boats from Venezuela, warning it’s coming dangerously close to “killing innocent civilians.”
On Tuesday’s broadcast of The Five, the mononymous co-host reacted to the president’s announcement of a strike on Monday—the second one this month in international waters. This action killed three passengers, while the first killed 11.
Despite trying to justify the strikes by calling all on board “narcoterrorists” threatening national security, Trump has faced blowback from a variety of figures like Venezuela’s president and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul. They have questioned why the passengers simply weren’t captured by the Coast Guard and later charged, per usual maritime drug laws.
Kennedy added to those voices.
“I don’t like it…because all it takes is one fishing boat with a broken radio or people who don’t speak English and you’re killing innocent civilians, and I do not like that,” she said.
Leading off Tuesday’s segment was a video of Trump suggesting that his strikes have scared enough fishing boats from the area that he doesn’t need to worry about that.
“Stop sending drugs into the United States,” Trump said. “We knocked off actually three boats, not two, but you saw two. And the problem is there a very few boats out on the water. There are not a lot of both on the water. I can’t imagine why. Not even fishing boats. There’s nobody. Nobody wants to go take a fish.”
Kennedy added that extrajudicial killings of drug smugglers wasn’t an appropriate way of carrying out the U.S. “war on drugs,” which she said “failed the first time around.”
“Things can go very badly here. We have not properly addressed demand in this country. That has not gone away. That is one of the reasons that the cartels proliferated during and after the war on drugs,” she said.
“We do have to address why do people—especially kids in this country—want to put things in their body they know can kill them? It is terrifying. And instead, we’re going it wrong,” added Kennedy, who advocated for better mental health treatment.
Sen. Paul’s criticisms of the strikes were spot-on, she continued. After the first one, the senator called out Vice President J.D. Vance for asserting that “killing cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military.”
JD “I don’t give a shit” Vance says killing people he accuses of a crime is the “highest and best use of the military.” Did he ever read To Kill a Mockingbird? Did he ever wonder what might happen if the accused were immediately executed without trial or representation??… https://t.co/VdnJbZkGfS
— Rand Paul (@RandPaul) September 7, 2025
“I do agree with Rand Paul here that if there are people we want to go after, instead of just killing them without any due process, put them on trial,” she said. “And, you know, if they get tried in a state where they do have the death penalty, then let due process play out.”
Kennedy’s colleagues saw it differently.
“For the first time, we’re going on offense for a change,” Jesse Watters said, while Greg Gutfeld latched onto the argument that the killings were justified because the targets “are not good people.”
“Everything Trump does is within a very clear frame,” he claimed. “We go after the bad guys, not people we disagree with. None of this is driven by emotion or ideology—just laws and facts. They’re drug traffickers. We have to get rid of them because they are killing Americans.”
Gutfeld, who once floated civil war because “elections don’t work,” insisted that he and others of the same mindset “are open about our love for law and order.”
While retired military lawyers have called the strikes illegal, the White House has suggested that even though Congress hasn’t authorized a war on cartels, the strikes are allowed under the laws of armed conflict because overdoses cause the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans each year.
The post Fox Host Comes Out Swinging Against Trump’s Drug Boat Strikes appeared first on The Daily Beast.
