Last year, in a New York federal courtroom, a crime boss from Honduras' most notorious drug cartel testified against Juan Orlando Hernandez, the country's former president. “They should have tried to catch us,” he said of the Honduran government, which Hernández led from 2014 to 2022. Instead, “they teamed up with us.” The former president was found to be responsible for shipping more than four hundred tons of cocaine into the United States. The Justice Department has been building cases against many of his family members and associates for years, especially during Donald Trump's first term.
On November 28, two days before national elections in Honduras, President Trump announced that he would pardon Hernandez, who was just one year into a 45-year sentence he served in a federal prison in West Virginia. “This was a Biden set-up,” Trump said. “I looked at the facts.” Although the White House denied it, similar facts apparently came from political operative Roger Stone, who handed the president a letter from Hernandez in which the former president called Trump “Your Excellency” and compared his plight to Trump's own “persecution.” Both men's shared resentment of Joe Biden apparently proved more important than Hernandez's list of toils. Trump seemed unconcerned that combating the flow of drugs into the United States is the main reason his administration launched a series of boat attacks in the Caribbean. These attacks, in which the US military has attacked suspected drug traffickers without evidence and killed at least eighty-seven people to date, appear to violate national and international law.
On the same day Trump announced the pardon, Washington Mail published an article saying that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had reportedly given verbal orders to kill two survivors of a September strike in the Caribbean. Killing anyone who has surrendered or become incapacitated is a war crime. Hegseth, who observed the operation from afar, immediately shifted responsibility to Admiral Frank M. Bradley, the commander in charge of the operation. “I personally did not see any survivors,” Hegseth said. “It's called the fog of war.”
On Thursday, Bradley briefed members of Congress in a closed session at the Capitol, where he denied orders to kill survivors and justified a second strike on the ground by saying that the undestroyed cocaine on the boat posed a “risk.” As might be expected, the vast majority of Republicans were ready to move on, but lawmakers who saw the footage described two survivors clinging to part of the boat. “How legal is it for President Trump to pardon a convicted drug dealer,” Sen. Chris Coons, D-Delaware, asked of the strikes? By evening, Hegseth was facing another scandal: The Defense Department's inspector general had just submitted a report to Congress that he had “created a threat to operational security” by sharing classified details of the attack in Yemen in a group chat on his phone. “Total vindication,” Hegseth wrote on X.
Hegseth's behavior is an example of how the administration's growing sense of inattention and irresponsibility is shaping disastrous policies. Since the president has designated several drug cartels as “terrorist organizations” in a series of executive orders, the government has simply said that alleged drug traffickers are “unlawful combatants” who can be killed without trial. Trump, citing drug overdose deaths in the United States, said the boat attacks were a form of national self-defense. But the drug that is overwhelmingly responsible for such deaths in the U.S. is fentanyl, which is not produced in South America.
The idea that these attacks are aimed at stopping drug use has never been credible; Instead, they reflect the president's growing fixation on Venezuela and the belief within the administration that its authoritarian leader, Nicolás Maduro, must be removed from office. Few outside Maduro's circle of supporters and enablers deny that he is a repressive, corrupt leader who has destroyed the economy and brutally punished critics. Last summer he declared victory in an election that he appeared to have lost badly. How to fight the Maduro regime is a legitimately pressing question. But his resignation case masks all of Trump's most dangerous tendencies, including his anti-immigrant sentiments and disregard for laws limiting his power.
