Donald Trump baffles even his own side of politics by pardoning a ‘notorious drug trafficker’ while also making a point of bombing drug traffickers
With the US military under pressure and possible action in Venezuela looming, one move from Donald Trump has confused even his allies.
COMMENT
Trust Donald Trump, unparalleled discombobulator that he is, to stand accused of being both too hard and too soft on criminals, and for both charges to somehow be true.
Twin dramas are keeping the White House’s communications team occupied at the moment.
The bigger one springs from their boss’s bombing campaign against drug smuggling boats off the coast of Venezuela, which was considered legally dubious even before this week, when we learned about what would, if substantiated, be a blatant war crime.
Mr Trump believes he is allowed to summarily kill the people on these boats because, by allegedly transporting deadly drugs to the US, they pose a serious threat to Americans; he argues that they’re essentially enemy combatants in an “armed conflict”.
The Trump administration, and particularly Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, have spent today quietly setting up a military officer, Admiral Mitch Bradley, to take the legal heat if necessary. And that has rightly been the top story in US politics.
Don’t sleep on the other drama though. This one involves Mr Trump’s curious decision to pardon the former leader of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernandez, saving him from a decades-long prison sentence for ... sorry, my notes say drug smuggling?
Yes, farcical as it sounds, that’s right. Hernandez was tried and convicted last year, in an American court, on sweeping drug trafficking charges.
A jury found he conspired to funnel hundreds of tons of cocaine, or about 4.5 billion individual doses of the stuff, into the United States, while taking millions of dollars in bribes and running Honduras like a “narco state”. He was sentenced to 45 years in jail.
That’s the guy Mr Trump just pardoned. While waging a campaign against drug trafficking so extreme it might violate both US and international law.
How to make sense of this? Is the Trump Doctrine, on criminal drug smuggling, that it is tantamount to fighting a war against the US ... unless you do a lot of it? In which case, the authorities are very sorry to have bothered you, and please go about your business?
Absolving Hernandez of his crimes, while executing people far lower on the drug smuggling organisation chart without even arresting them, let alone bothering with a trial, is like killing a bunch of Nazi footsoldiers and then setting Goering free. It is impressively incoherent.
You find yourself sympathising somewhat with Bill Cassidy, a US senator from Mr Trump’s own party, who yesterday voiced the confusion all his colleagues were feeling.
“Why would we pardon this guy?” Mr Cassidy wondered, with a sort of plaintive innocence.
“I don’t understand why he is being pardoned.”
If only there were someone in the senator’s rolodex who could explain it to him! Perhaps even someone with sole responsibility for this very decision? It’s like listening to a hapless mate as he processes being dumped.
“Why would we end this relationship? I just don’t understand why I’m being made single.” Buddy, you have her phone number, just call her and ask.
Of course, it’s like this almost every time a Republican musters the courage to actually disagree with Mr Trump in public. Their criticism is implicit. It uses the passive voice. There is no actual mention of He Who Must Not Be Named. And no one in particular is doing the unjustifiable thing; it is merely happening, like a hurricane or season 73 of Big Brother.
Luckily for Mr Cassidy, Mr Trump has offered a public explanation.
“Can you explain more about why you would pardon a notorious drug trafficker?” a reporter asked him on Air Force One.
“Well, I don’t know who you’re talking about,” the President replied.
“Juan Orlando Hernandez,” she clarified.
“Well I was told, I was asked by Honduras, many people of Honduras, they said it was a Biden setup,” said Mr Trump.
“And the people of Honduras really thought he was set up, and it was a terrible thing. He was the president of the country. And they basically said he was a drug dealer, because he was the president of the country. And they said it was a Biden administration setup, and I looked at the facts, and I agreed with them.”
“What evidence can you share that he was set up?” the reporter asked.
“Well, you take a look. You can say that, take any country you want, if somebody sells drugs in that country, that doesn’t mean you arrest the president and put him in jail for the rest of his life.
“That includes this country, OK, to be honest. I mean, if somebody does something wrong, do you put the president of the country in jail? They said it was a Biden set up.”
Who is “they”, in that sentence? Which lobbyist convinced Mr Trump that the investigation and prosecution of Hernandez, which spanned multiple US administrations and ended with a jury convicting him, was actually an elaborate conspiracy to frame the leader of a foreign country for ... some reason?
Those are important questions, because the impression we’re getting from Mr Trump’s pattern of pardoning well-connected people is of a President who can be influenced easily by anybody who so much as whispers the word “Biden” at him. It matters not just to Americans, but to the rest of the world too, if the American President is that gullible.
Again, because it’s vital to be clear about this: Hernandez was not prosecuted for merely being president of a country where people were selling drugs, as Mr Trump seems to sincerely believe. An American court found he had conspired to move an immense volume of cocaine into the United States, and had used his authority in government to protect the cartels.
The evidence against Hernandez included testimony from convicted traffickers who had worked with him directly, intercepted phone calls he’d had with drug cartel members, and financial ledgers that showed he’d received bribes.
It’s not just that Mr Trump is manipulable. It’s that he is impulsive (or instinctive, if you prefer a nicer word for it). So much of what he does is through a jerk of the knee, with barely any input from his brain.
If he was suspicious about the Hernandez prosecution, he could have directed his handpicked Attorney-General, Pam Bondi, to review the case. And if she came back to him with a bunch of red flags, Mr Trump could have then considered a pardon.
But he didn’t think to do that. Which means years of law enforcement work have now been pissed away on a whim, and a guy responsible for wrecking untold thousands of lives gets to pretend he did nothing wrong.
Look at Mr Trump’s response to the shooting in Washington D.C. last week. One Afghan migrant allegedly committed a loathsome crime. A temperate president would have ordered his security agencies to find out whether any danger signs had been missed when that suspect entered the country.
Mr Trump skipped that step entirely, falsely claimed everyone who was evacuated to the US when it withdrew from Afghanistan, most of whom had helped US forces, was unvetted and potentially dangerous, and moved to impose draconian new restrictions on migrants from multiple countries.
All of that in response to one shooting, when we still don’t even know the suspect’s motive, and have no idea when or how he was radicalised. You shudder to think how this version of Donald Trump would have reacted if he’d been president in September of 2001.
That is the most important story here. Not the hypocrisy of pardoning one drug smuggler while bombing others, but the fact that America’s President so often bases his decisions on vibes, assumptions and bad information.
Originally published as Donald Trump baffles even his own side of politics by pardoning a ‘notorious drug trafficker’ while also making a point of bombing drug traffickers
