Trump's war on drugs includes some notable exceptions [View all]

Trump’s war on drugs includes some notable exceptions
The president's pardon of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández contradicts his strategy. Or does it?

By Heather Digby Parton
Columnist
Published December 2, 2025 9:05AM (EST)


(Salon) 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.

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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.”

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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.

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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. ..................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/12/02/trumps-war-on-drugs-includes-some-notable-exceptions/