Trump’s Murderous Hypocrisy on Drug Trafficking Is Bone-Chilling 

Before Donald Trump began his second term, we knew he was a hypocrite on crime. He has posed as a law-and-order champion while being a criminal convicted of fraud and found by a jury liable for sexual assault—and overseeing a business convicted of fraud. In his first term as well as his second, he violated established procedures when pardoning unrepentant criminals without proper vetting, some of whom violated the law again. But Trump’s hypocrisy on crime is most jarring when it involves drug trafficking. As I wrote last June during the 2024 campaign, during his first term, Trump proposed giving drug dealers the death penalty, then three months later, he commuted the life sentence of cocaine trafficker Alice Marie Johnson.  

The African-American grandmother was a cause célèbre on the left—a personification of what’s wrought by mandatory minimum sentences and whose freedom was sought by the American Civil Liberties Union and Kim Kardashian. Still, she spoke at the 2020 Republican National Convention and, then, about two months before the election, Trump pardoned her. In turn, few contemporaneously complained about Trump’s crass attempt to woo Black voters. But it was a sign that Trump’s anti-drug tirades were insincere. 

An even clearer sign appeared in May 2024, when Trump stumped at the Libertarian Party convention by promising to free Ross Ulbricht, who was serving two life sentences for facilitating over a million drug deals through his Silk Road website. Libertarians—who, unlike Trump, support broad drug legalization—had been vigorously campaigning for Ulbricht’s release.  Once again, Trump was trading the freedom of a drug dealer—the sort of person he claims to believe deserves the death penalty—to win votes.  

The transactional offer appears to have worked. The 2024 Libertarian Party nominee Chase Oliver was shunned some of his own party leaders for eschewing anti-transgender rights policies among other issues, and the party chair openly opined for Trump’s victory. Oliver’s vote share was about one-third of his 2020 predecessor, as Libertarian voters presumably gravitated to Trump. Trump followed through on his convention promise and then some, issuing a full pardon to Ulbricht on his second day back in office.  

Coincidentally, one month after Trump addressed the Libertarian convention, Juan Orlando Hernández was sentenced to 45 years in prison for using the presidency of Honduras to, in the words of a federal prosecutor, “facilitate the importation of an almost unfathomable 400 tons of cocaine to this country: billions of individual doses sent to the United States…” As reported by The New York Times, “The judge in his case, P. Kevin Castel, had called Mr. Hernández ‘a two-faced politician hungry for power’ who masqueraded as an antidrug crusader while partnering with traffickers.” 

This is the same Hernández whom, on Friday, Trump said he would pardon. 

Trump announced in a social media post that also endorsed Hernández’s ally Tito Asfura in this weekend’s Honduran presidential election. On Sunday, he asserted without evidence that Hernández was framed by a “Biden administration setup.” 

A pardon for Hernández (which doesn’t appear to have been formally issued yet) would be the most glaring and disturbing act of hypocrisy by Trump, especially after 21 military strikes on boats in waters off Central and South America, killing at least 83 people who appeared to be unarmed. Trump has asserted the crews were “narco-terrorists” and “combatants” subject to military force, but has not provided evidence. Several countries, including the United Kingdom, have scaled back their intelligence sharing from the region with the U.S., since they don’t want to be accomplices to illegal murders. 

Even some congressional Republicans are expressing concerns that the strikes amount to war crimes following a Washington Post report that on September 2, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reportedly gave a verbal order to kill all crew members of a boat off Trinidad. This prompted a second missile strike after the first left two survivors. The Republican chair and Democratic ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee released a joint statement announcing they have “directed inquiries” regarding “alleged follow-on strikes” to the Department of Defense. Their House counterparts released a similar statement. Representative Mike Turner, an Ohio Republican, told CBS’s Face the Nation, “Obviously, if that occurred, that would be very serious, and I agree that would be an illegal act.” (On Sunday, Trump aboard Air Force One the president said of Hegseth’s alleged order: “He said he did not say that and I believe him.”) 

But while any spoken order to kill unarmed individuals could put Hegseth at legal risk, let’s not forget that the drug boat strikes are of dubious legality, and Trump’s commitment to them is bone-chilling. 

Presidents often feel compelled to issue military orders killing foreigners, such as to prevent a terrorist attack. Whether any order is truly necessary or legally executed can be debated. But in nearly every case involving previous presidents, the national security concern was genuine or at least plausible. While interdiction is a long-standing way of preventing drugs from entering the country, drug trafficking is not such a severe national security threat that warrants military force risking the murder of innocents who never got due process.  

Even as a crass political matter, Trump’s rationale is inexplicable. One can understand why Trump pardoned Johnson and Ulbricht to peel off African-American and Libertarian votes. But what political profit does Trump reap from killing Latin American boaters? He can’t run for a third term, despite what his merch says. There’s no reason to believe a drug interdiction effort would influence the 2026 midterm election when voters will likely prioritize the cost-of-living. And, as Trump knows well, there are ways to distract voters without deadly force. The boat strikes seem an attempt to paint Venezuela as a narcostate and justify ousting President Nicolás Maduro. While Maduro is no saint, Trump has no more political or moral duty to oust him than the dictators he embraces. 

Perhaps there’s more to Trump’s missile strikes than they appear. But based on what we can see, it seems murderously depraved. It’s sickeningly hypocritical: Trump’s plans to pardon a real narcostate president prosecuted by a Justice Department team that included one of his top lawyers (unlikely to have taken part in a Biden “setup”), and convicted by a U.S. jury.  

Comparing presidential scandals can be a fraught exercise. But a president killing boaters on specious claims of “narcoterrorism” while pardoning major drug traffickers is a scandal bloodier than Watergate. 

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