Trump follows through on an especially ugly campaign promise
He's talked about executing drug dealers for a decade.
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For years, Donald Trump has fantasized about lawlessly executing drug dealers.
In his second term, he’s made the fantasy a reality, killing drug dealers in a likely illegal airstrike campaign on vessels in international waters. Yet at the same time, Trump last week pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who had just started serving a 45-year federal prison sentence for helping to traffic hundreds of tons of cocaine into the United States during his eight-year tenure as president.
This gaping hypocrisy is just one of a seemingly endless number of contradictory positions, blatant gaslighting, and outright scandals that are roiling the Trump administration as it closes out the year.
From the Epstein files to economic policy, political prosecutions of Trump’s enemies, grifting off the presidency and government-wide corruption, the first year of the second Trump administration is ending on an erratic, chaotic, and dismal note.
There’s another wrinkle to the boat strikes situation that doesn’t quite add up: The administration claims the killing is necessary because “narco-terrorists” and drug cartels are waging war against Americans through their trafficking of deadly drugs. To protect American lives, America needed to take the fight to the traffickers themselves.
As a result, the Trump administration designated one of these cartels — Cartel de los Soles — a “foreign terrorist organization,” claiming that Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro was the cartel’s de facto leader.
The cartel “is headed by Maduro and other high-ranking individuals of the illegitimate Maduro regime who have corrupted Venezuela’s military, intelligence, legislature, and judiciary,” reads a November 16 statement from Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
But compare that with Trump’s recent defense of his pardon of Hernandez.
“He was the president of the country, and they basically said he was a drug dealer because he was the president of the country,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One last week, claiming that the case against Hernandez was a “Biden setup” despite the fact the investigation into Hernandez began before Biden’s tenure as president.
No one in the administration has explained this confounding discrepancy, but there are hints as to why Hernandez is receiving preferential treatment while Maduro — and the dead and dying people on boats in the ocean — is not.
The reasons have less to do with American lives lost to drugs and more to do with US foreign policy and the business interests of tech titans — the exact type of neoconservative interventionism that Trump’s “America first” supporters, including his vice president, have said they want nothing to do with.
Perhaps worse, Trump’s hypocritical pardon of Hernandez and the deadly strikes could simply be more evidence of an administration that is being run by whomever has Trump’s ear at a given moment as he slips further into senility and irrelevance.
Honduran elections, tech money, and the global right
The Trump administration claims its strikes against drug boats from South America protect Americans — despite the fact that most drug overdoses are caused by fentanyl, which largely comes from China. But they’ve coincided with a military buildup in the region that’s aimed at regime change in Venezuela.
The administration blames Maduro, who refused to step down after losing last year’s presidential election and has overseen a devastating economic collapse in the country, for a flood of undocumented immigrants into the US. Trump’s ulterior motive — showing off US military prowess in Maduro’s territory as the administration pushes for regime change there — is clear, even while the reasoning behind the Hernandez pardon is murky. But there are clues as to what’s really going on here.
Longtime Trump associate and right-wing operative Roger Stone personally lobbied for Hernandez’s release — free of charge, Stone claims. Meanwhile, former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale has been working for the campaign of Nasry Asfura, the right-wing candidate for the Honduran presidency who is from the same political party as Hernandez. Trump endorsed Asfura in the election, whose results have not been finalized and are being contested by Asfura’s opponent.
It’s possible that Trump pardoned Hernandez as a sign of support for right-wing candidates like Hernandez and Asfura — and as retaliation against Honduran President Xiomara Castro, a leftist and Trump critic. In fact, Stone suggested this very tactic early this year.
“A well-timed pardon of former President Hernandez by President Trump could be the final death blow to Castro with national elections set to take place later this year,” Stone wrote in January. Back then, there was no favorite to win the presidential election in Honduras, but Castro backed a leftist who would have continued pushing Honduras toward a more socialist government. Stone and others preferred a right-wing candidate.
Stone went on to criticize Castro for her opposition to a special economic zone that contains the “freedom city” of Prospéra, which Hernandez was instrumental in developing. Prospéra is a so-called “network state” funded by Trump-backing tech and finance figures Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and Sam Altman. The city is billed by Stone and others as a haven for experimental libertarian government, with an emphasis on digital currency and biotech innovation.
There’s no plausible explanation for pardoning Hernandez that has anything to do with saving American lives. There is, however, an explanation for doing so based on the desire to secure cooperative leadership in Honduras, a country whose population represents a significant number of asylum claims and immigrants flowing into the US.
Execute drug dealers, free kingpins
Protecting Americans from drugs has been at the center of the administration’s case for the strikes being carried out by the US military, which have resulted in the killing of dozens of what appear to be low-level smugglers — or, as reported by the New York Times, Venezuelan fishermen. But the Hernandez pardon contradicts the rationale for the strikes, putting Republicans in a spot where they struggle to explain what Trump is doing.
“Can you square that for us as you were talking about this objective of fighting this scourge of drugs?” Rep. Derrick Van Orden, a vocal Trump backer, was asked about the Hernandez pardon on CNN last week.
“Honestly, I don’t know the specific details of this case and what happened, but I’m a firm believer, if you are selling drugs or smuggling drugs into the United States you need to pay a very, very heavy price,” Van Orden said. “And my primary concern, and I will never apologize for it, is protecting American citizens and I know that Donald Trump is doing that too.”
Meanwhile, Republicans have also begun to break with Trump on the strikes themselves. Rep. Mike Turner noted on Thursday that the alleged crime being committed by the targets of the strikes — smuggling drugs — is not punishable by death.
“This activity that’s happening in the Caribbean where they are hitting these boats — these individuals, if they were captured and tried and convicted, they would be guilty of criminal activity for which they’re not subject to capital punishment,” Turner said. “These people are being killed.”
Questions about the strikes have become only more pointed as Democrats have described the disturbing details of the strike on September 2. After the first missiles split the boat in half and killed nine people, two men clung to the wreckage, “moments from slipping under the waves,” Rep. Jim Hines said on Thursday, calling the incident “one of the most troubling things” he’s ever seen. The military then killed the survivors.
The deadly strikes are in line, however, with Trump’s longtime demand for the death penalty for drug dealers.
For years, Trump has claimed without evidence that an individual drug dealer is responsible for the deaths of as many as 5,000 people in their lifetime. No one knows where the claim came from, and Trump nor anyone around him have ever explained its origin.
Trump hast claimed the ongoing strikes are saving even more Americans than his previous, un-cited, estimates.
“Every boat we knock out we save 25,000 American lives,” Trump said during last week’s cabinet meeting. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem went even further during the same event.
“You have saved hundreds of millions of lives with the cocaine you’ve blown up in the Caribbean,” Noem claimed.
In 2023, the most recent year for which data is available, the Centers for Disease Control reported 105,007 drug overdose deaths in the US. About 70 percent of those deaths were caused by opioids, primarily fentanyl. Overdose deaths attributed to cocaine numbered 29,449.
The decision to pardon Hernandez has been nearly as inexplicable as the origin of Trump’s claims about drug dealers killing 500 people a piece. It seems like there’s a lot of inexplicable things these days.
As the collection of authoritarian grifters and neoconservative leftovers take to television and social media each day to sell their various cons and schemes to the public, Trump appears more and more to be a passive actor, watching as the people around him run his administration as they please.
This has resulted in erratic and contradictory policies, such siding with Russia in its war against Ukraine because Trump likes Putin but at the same time insisting on regime change in Venezuela. Similarly, the Trump administration has drastically reduced foreign aid but bailed out Argentina to the tune of $20 billion in American tax dollars. For years, Trump and his two top FBI leaders rage-baited the MAGA base with claims about Jeffery Epstein and a global cabal of Democratic sex predators — only to fight the release of the Epstein files at every step this year.
Now, the Trump administration is busy killing drug smugglers on boats to “protect” Americans — but letting a convicted kingpin like Hernandez walk free.
If Trump’s poll numbers are any indication, even some of his supporters are beginning to wonder how all these contradictions and chaos amount to the “America first” mantra they elected him on.
As Trump has boasted that he’s stopped eight wars around the globe and lobbied to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, his administration has said its going to war with “narco terrorists” — and maybe even the nation of Venezuela itself. Who asked for all this? Trump believes Americans will simply go along.
“I think you’re going to find that this is war,” Trump said last week as reporters asked questions about the September 2 strike. “I think you’re going to find that there’s a very receptive ear to doing exactly what they’re doing, taking out those boats.”
That’s it for today
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Thanks for reading.
The sociopathy in the executive branch is widespread and will lead this country into perdition. This “shoot first, ask no questions later” stance has murdered non-combatants. If not cauterized, this bloodletting will continue and eventually extend to the citizenry. How can we rid ourselves of these troublesome maniacs?
How on earth did this (morally repugnant) clown show ever get elected????