In case you needed further proof that President Trump’s case for his boat bombings is a steaming pile of horse-bleep, he just helpfully provided reams of additional evidence in a new interview with Politico. In so doing, Trump also handed Democrats a new weapon to hound Republicans mercilessly if they fail to exercise oversight over these ongoing crimes—oversight that must go all the way to the top.
Remarkably, in this interview, Trump revealed that his pardon of Honduran ex-President Juan Orlando Hernandez for his drug-trafficking conviction—in a U.S. court—is almost comically ill predicated. This came when Politico’s Dasha Burns pointed out that Hernandez’s pardon casts doubt on Trump’s commitment to combating drug trafficking—the stated grounds for his boat bombings.
Trump then responded:
Well, I don’t know him. And I know very little about him other than people said it was like, uh, an Obama-Biden type setup, where he was set up … there are many people fighting for Honduras, very good people that I know. And they think he was treated horribly, and they asked me to do it, and I said I’ll do it.
This is monumentally deranged stuff. Note that Trump admits he knows next to nothing about Hernandez’s case, even though prosecutors won a conviction after alleging that he helped bring more than 500 tons of cocaine into the United States. Trump pardoned him with zero serious reflection on the impact he had on drug use in our country. This is by Trump’s own admission.
Then, after Burns asked Trump if this sends “the wrong message to drug dealers,” Trump segued into claiming Hernandez was the victim of “weaponized” government, just as Trump himself was. Combine this with Trump’s confession that he granted this pardon because people “asked me to do it,” and the takeaway is inescapable. He did it as a favor, probably corruptly, or out of his narcissistic association of Hernandez with himself, or a combination of both: His narcissism subjects him to easy manipulation by corrupt actors.
Trump has ordered the killings of over 80 people in the Caribbean Sea on the grounds that they are bringing drugs into the United States. His administration hasn’t presented serious evidence of this, and indeed, tons of evidence contradicts it in various ways. Yet Trump has designated these alleged drug traffickers as “narco-terrorists” and claims constitutional authority to kill them as combatants in a war. Most legal experts dismiss this as nonsense, noting that he’s claiming the authority to summarily execute civilians who are not in fact waging war against the U.S.
For Trump to then blithely admit to pardoning someone who trafficked in infinitely more drugs than any of these people he’s illegally killing—while not bothering to familiarize himself at all with that man’s crimes against our country—should conclusively demolish the idea that any of this is about drugs coming into our homeland.
It gets worse. Under questioning, Trump justified his campaign by claiming the bombing of each boat saves 25,000 American lives, which is a brain-dead lie in numerous ways. Trump also told Politico, “We’re gonna hit ’em on land very soon, too,” seemingly saying straight out that a ground invasion of some sort in Venezuela is coming.
And then, after Burns noted that very little if any fentanyl comes to the U.S. via Venezuela or via boats off its coast, this exchange happened:
Burns: So would you consider doing something similar with Mexico and Colombia that are even more responsible for fentanyl trafficking into the U.S.?
Trump: Yeah, I would. Sure. I would.
Note that it’s now taken as a given—as an unremarkable and baked-in fact about our politics—that Trump is mulling a ground invasion of Venezuela and a dramatic expansion in his bombing campaign with no congressional authorization. What emerges from this interview is that Trump is pulling all of this—the substantive case for these bombings, the legal justification for them, the rationale for mulling a massive military escalation in the Western hemisphere—out of his rear end.
It’s fortuitous that this comes amid new signs that Republicans might—might—be open to more oversight over these bombings. That GOP concern comes amid continuing controversy over the news that two men were killed in a follow-up strike on September 2 as they clung to a boat destroyed in an initial strike, which violates the laws of war.
We just learned, for instance, that lawmakers have inserted a provision into the annual defense bill that withholds one-fourth of Hegseth’s travel budget to force some oversight. The provision would require the Pentagon to release the written order for the strikes and unedited video of them to the Senate and House Armed Services committees.
That’s a step forward. Representative Adam Smith, the ranking Armed Services Democrat, tells me via text that the Pentagon has not released those written orders to the committee despite demands for it. That confirms other reports to this effect, and it’s important, because seeing them would allow lawmakers to assess precisely what Hegseth ordered, leading to that second strike. That could reveal Hegseth to be even more culpable. Such a public release would also make video of the second strike—and perhaps all the others—available to a wider pool of lawmakers.
What’s more, Smith confirms to me that this insertion into the defense bill proceeded with the “quiet acquiesce” of Republicans. While we mustn’t forget that this entire bombing campaign is illegal, the peculiarly heinous nature of the second strike might be prying open the door to more oversight later.
What this new interview really confirms is that this oversight absolutely must go all the way to the very top, as national security law expert Tess Bridgeman explains on The New Republic’s podcast. We know that at least one military lawyer internally objected to the bombings, that the admiral previously overseeing them abruptly resigned amid concerns about them, and that the legal memo fake-justifying them—which hasn’t been released—appears to be a deeply unserious document.
So what has Trump been advised internally about the legal and substantive basis for these strikes? What have his underlings told him? What deliberations took place over Trump’s decision to pardon the ex-president of Honduras? Has Trump discussed pardoning Hegseth or any others involved in these illegal killings?
Trump’s disastrous admissions in this interview reveal again that he is profoundly, catastrophically unfit to be making any of these decisions. By even the most minimal standard of public service, this should induce more Republicans to get to the bottom of all of it. Democrats should use these new revelations to hound them relentlessly if they refuse, as they surely will.
