"Assassination has not exactly been a foreign concept to American presidents. After all, there were those CIA-backed plots during the presidency of John F. Kennedy (who was himself assassinated) aimed at killing foreign leaders ranging from the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba to Cuba’s Fidel Castro. In Lyndon Johnson’s and Richard Nixon’s years in the White House, there was the CIA’s massive Phoenix Program of assassination in Vietnam. In all such cases, however, presidents could at least invoke plausible deniability on the subject.

That’s changed since the U.S. developed a unique assassination weapon, the Hellfire missile-armed, remotely piloted drone, first used in America’s Global War on Terror during George W. Bush’s presidency and brought to a kind of grim perfection in the Obama years. In 2012, the New York Times revealed that President Obama and his team kept a secret “kill list” at the White House and were conducting “terror Tuesday” weekly meetings during which they chose drone assassination targets, one by one.

I pointed out then that, whether Americans realized it or not, in any future national election we would be casting our votes not just for a commander-in-chief but an assassin-in-chief. And that has proven sadly true. Admittedly, Donald Trump skipped the terror Tuesday meetings and simply agreed to ramp up this country’s global drone assassination program, while loosening the rules on who could be targeted (and so increasing civilian deaths from such strikes), allowing both the CIA and the military to kill more freely. Now, our fourth assassin-in-chief has entered the Oval Office and, according to Charlie Savage and Eric Schmitt of the New York Times, his administration has just “quietly imposed temporary limits” on such strikes by insisting on “White House permission” for them, while undertaking “a broad review of whether to tighten Trump-era rules for such operations.”"