A murderous president?

Lake Ontario becomes Lake America?

Really?

One of the unfortunate realities of having a president whose head is like a bag of hammers is you can never be certain of what he is up to. I wanted to refer to him as scamp, but that diminishes immensely the nature of his behavior .

Any of you who have raised children know this feeling.

You are absolutely certain the kid’s okay and then a cop shows up with a child who decided to see what it would be like to scale a building, or perhaps walk across the top of a bridge over the Chicago River.

Or who knows what else?

You forgive them, always, because you love them. You try to correct their behavior.

You sit down to a good meal and lots of trouble evaporates because, after all, they were your kids. A voice echoes in your head, your own father telling you there is nothing brighter in the middle of the night that the headlights of a state police car.

What was that about?

You later learned that was what happened when you ran a car full of bootleg hootch from up the mountain down to the big city. It was during prohibition. No charges. The cops just seized the alcohol and did what local law did with things up in the mountains.

They sold it.

And you recall your own adventures, that time the railroad policeman sat in front of your house to tell your father he found you in a scrap yard trying to steal what looked like giant Slinkies

.

The follies of you, sometimes not pretty, but follies just the same.

That can’t apply to Donald J. Trump. Just because he acts like a spoiled child, that doesn’t mean we can afford to think of him that way.

He has ordered the murder of countless dozens of people in boats who may or may not have been smuggling drugs. We have due process to handle problems. Law enforcement doesn’t start with the execution part. It might end that way in some states, but only after crimes have been identified, investigated and prosecuted.

We have scores of authorities on hand to await a boat’s arrival, the technology to follow it from the minute it starts into the ocean and the legal authority when it lands to grab what cargo and prosecute, if that is necessary.

But we don’t just shoot everyone on board and dump their bodies into the ocean. A criminal might do that but...wait a minute! The president already is a criminal. Courts have said so.

Now he is killing people at sea.

Illegal? Yes. Immoral? Yes.

Presidential?

I don’t think so.

Charlie Madigan was a reporter and editor for 40 years at United Press International and The Chicago Tribune. He lives in Evanston and writes the Lightningwriter blog on Substack and Facebook. Find more at charlesmadigan.com.