While the Trump administration insists that invoking the magic words “drug traffickers” justifies murdering people on the high seas, when it comes to actual big-time drug traffickers, President Donald Trump has quite the soft spot.
Trump has granted clemency to around 100 people for drug-related crimes between his first term and his current pardon palooza. This time around, he’s focused on bestowing his mercy upon the kingpins who oversee vast empires and can flood the country with drugs.
Wait, what?
Per Trump, every illegal boat strike that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered somehow saves 25,000 lives because now the hypothetical traffickers with the hypothetical drugs will never reach our shores.
Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, a major drug trafficker who was pardoned by President Donald Trump
But an actual trafficker who took bribes to help actual traffickers move 400 tons of cocaine—400 TONS OF COCAINE!—into the United States? Well, he’s just a widdle guy who was targeted by the mean Biden administration.
That’s basically the justification for Trump’s pardon of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who was convicted for that bribery scheme and sentenced to 45 years in prison. But thanks to Trump, he walked free after just seven months.
In fact, Trump was so hyped to pardon Hernández that he did it without even bothering to hear his appeal, which was scheduled for this week. Instead, Trump just made a surprise announcement on Truth Social.
“CONGRATULATIONS TO JUAN ORLANDO HERNANDEZ ON YOUR UPCOMING PARDON,” he wrote. “MAKE HONDURAS GREAT AGAIN!”
Apparently, neither Hernández’s lawyer nor his wife knew about the pardon until seeing Trump’s Truth Social post, which is a totally good and normal way for a president to use the pardon power.
When confronted with this contradiction—lethal strikes on defenseless boaters versus mercy for well-heeled drug traffickers—White House press secretary Karolilne Leavitt responded with a typical word salad.
“I think that President Trump has been quite clear, in his defense of the United States homeland, to stop these illegal narcotics from coming to our borders, whether that’s by land or by sea, and he’s also made it quite clear that he wants to correct the wrongs of the weaponized Justice Department under the previous administration,” she told reporters.
Related | Nothing says ‘tough on drugs’ like Trump pardoning a trafficker
Also this term, Trump pardoned Russ Ulbricht, the founder of Silk Road, a dark web paradise for drug traffickers; and Garnett Smith, an actual drug kingpin in Baltimore. What these pardons have in common is that they were all for big-timers—the guys who run the show, not the ones who get their hands dirty.
Though it might seem like an odd connection, this is the same impulse that animates Trump’s pursuit of ginned-up mortgage fraud allegations against Federal Reserve Board Gov. Lisa Cook.
The administration has relentlessly pursued Cook, claiming that she committed mortgage fraud by telling two different lenders that two different houses would be her primary residence. At the same time, it’s studiously ignoring that multiple high-level members of the administration have the exact same mortgage arrangements.
A cartoon by Drew Sheneman.
It also appears that Trump had the same arrangement. Who could possibly have predicted that? Everyone. Everyone could.
ProPublica found that, in 1993, Trump told a lender that a house in Palm Beach, Florida, would be his main residence to net more favorable loan terms than if it would as a second home or investment property. Just a few weeks later, he got a different loan for another Florida property, telling that lender that it would be his main residence.
The biggest punchline is that Trump apparently never lived in either of those properties and—you guessed it—rents them out as investment properties.
When you think of Trump as his former lawyer Michael Cohen framed him—a man who runs his operation like a mob boss, speaking in code understood by other mobsters—this all makes sense. The code here is that fealty to Trump is the only currency that matters, and the only people who can afford that are the very rich and the very corrupt.
Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas is about to find out what happens if you make a corrupt bargain with Trump and then renege, making clear that fealty was only transactional. Trump pardoned Cuellar, but now he’s not upholding his end of the deal: to either run as a Republican or to step aside for a Republican. Instead, Cuellar is running again as a Democrat, and Trump is furious.
This is no way to run a presidency, but it’s a great way to run a criminal enterprise. And, really, that’s all that Trump’s doing these days.
