Trump’s war on drugs includes some notable exceptions

Over Thanksgiving weekend, President Donald Trump posted an ominous warning on Truth Social: “To all Airlines, Pilots, Drug Dealers, and Human Traffickers, please consider THE AIRSPACE ABOVE AND SURROUNDING VENEZUELA TO BE CLOSED IN ITS ENTIRETY.” People naturally assumed this might mean that the anticipated direct attack on Venezuela was imminent and braced themselves for the inevitable death and destruction. On Sunday, Trump told the media to not “read anything into it.” That changed again on Monday, when reports emerged that during a phone call he made last week to Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, Trump advised Maduro he had a week to leave the country.

Meanwhile, the administration’s lethal attacks on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean Sea continue unabated and a new scandal has erupted implicating Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and others in potential war crimes for allegedly ordering the executions of unarmed survivors of the first attack on Sept. 2. Trump told the media that Hegseth said he never gave the order but that as president, he would not have wanted it — suggesting that if proof emerges, Hegseth’s rumored departure from the Pentagon is a near certainty. 

The reason for all this is Trump’s war on what he says are Venezuelan “narco-terrorists” that are attacking the United States under Maduro’s leadership. (The “cartel” he is alleged to be leading is not actually a cartel, but that’s just an inconvenient detail.) During the first Trump administration in 2020, the Justice Department indicted Maduro and 14 others on charges of narco-terrorism, corruption, drug trafficking and other crimes “expressly intending to flood the United States with cocaine in order to undermine the health and wellbeing of our nation.”

Despite that florid language, the indictment against Maduro mostly related to money laundering and corruption. In fact, the cocaine drug trade from Venezuela doesn’t even come to America; it’s directed almost entirely at Europe. (And fentanyl, which the Trump administration is ostensibly targeting with these attacks, is almost exclusively smuggled over land from Mexico.)

Nonetheless, what used to be a metaphorical war on drugs is now a real war, with the U.S. military actually blowing stuff up. Sen. Dave McCormick, R-Penn., compared it to Vietnam on Fox News Sunday, saying “we have a war that’s coming through fentanyl, through opioids, through cocaine. It killed 100,000 Americans last year. That’s twice the number of people that died in eight years of Vietnam — 4,000 Pennsylvanians.” His colleague, Sen. Markwayne Mullin, R-Ok., also evoked Vietnam on CNN with histrionic claims that Venezuela is killing hundreds of thousands of Americans each year. (They might want to rethink that talking point; the Vietnam War didn’t exactly end well.) The message is clear: This country is deadly serious about fighting the drug war. 

How odd then that Donald Trump, the crusading scourge of drug kingpins everywhere, would announce, seemingly out-of-the-blue, that he will pardon Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, who is currently serving a 45-year sentence in the United States for trafficking more than 500 tons of cocaine into the country. After interfering in yet another Latin American election by promising to shower the country with American largesse if they vote for his chosen right-wing authoritarian leader — or withdrawing all American support if they don’t — Trump dropped the bombshell in the middle of a Truth Social post saying that according to people he greatly respects, Hernández was treated very harshly and unfairly. The whole case, Trump explained, was nothing but a Joe Biden set-up and that you don’t blame a president just because someone in his country is a drug-runner. 

Trump might have made a phone call to his former personal lawyer, hand-picked deputy attorney general and now federal judge Emil Bove. He was the prosecutor who took down Hernández’s brother, the former president’s partner-in-crime. Bove stepped down from the Southern District of New York just a month before the Juan Orlando Hernández indictment was handed down, and he doubtless knew all the details. 

The New York Times reported that the former Honduran president “once boasted that he would ‘stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses’ [and] accepted a $1 million bribe from El Chapo to allow cocaine shipments to pass through Honduras. A man was killed in prison to protect him.” Among the evidence, there was even a machine gun with Hernández’s name on it. Contrary to what Trump’s respected friends told him, the prosecution proved Hernández was a key player in a 20-year scheme to traffic drugs into the United States.

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But there were a number of well-paid lobbyists working to get Trump to pardon Hernández, and one of his most trusted advisers, Roger Stone, recently began boosting the case by talking up what he called “the relatively obscure charter city experiment known as Próspera [that was] founded in 2017 as an experiment in freedom.” Crucially, it was founded in Honduras by an American company and “funded through venture capital from Silicon Valley luminaries like Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen and Sam Altman.” Stone’s claims that Próspera is a libertarian utopia is not widely held, and Honduras’ current government is hostile to the experiment, which explains why it was so important to persuade Trump to weigh in on the current election. Oh, and there’s also a Bitcoin connection.

Likewise, Bitcoin was involved in Trump’s outrageous pardon of another major drug trafficker: Ross Ulbricht, the owner of Silk Road, a dark web criminal enterprise the president Trump had promised at a crypto conference during the 2024 campaign to free. Uhlbricht was convicted of making more than $200 million, mostly in illegal online sales of cocaine, heroin and fentanyl. But the anti-drug crusading president thought that he, too, had been “treated very unfairly” and deserved a break. (Trump and his entire family are also making billion in the crypto business since he took office so there’s that as well.)

These aren’t the only drug kingpins Trump has pardoned or commuted since he returned to the White House. In fact, the president seems ready to believe that any of them were just victims of deep state persecution as he was, especially if the request comes from celebrities like Kanye West. There are no doubt many people serving excessive sentences for drug crimes in America who are deserving of mercy. But these pardons and commutations from a president who calls for the death penalty for drug dealing are just incoherent. 

In the case of Hernández, the former Honduran president, it’s actually a bit clearer. Trump told the New York Times, “They gave him 45 years because he was the President of the Country — you could do this to any President.” 

As Will Saletan pointed out at the Bulwark, Trump has made a habit of publicly threatening countries if they don’t let far-right politicians — including Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, France’s Marine Le Pen and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu — off the hook. Donald Trump identifies with them — and he admits it freely. 

So it’s really not much more complicated than this: It’s all about him. It’s always all about him.