Trump follows through on an especially ugly campaign promise
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Juan Orlando Hernández
13 min read
The article centers on Trump's pardon of the former Honduran president who was convicted of drug trafficking. Understanding Hernández's full political history, his relationship with the US, and the details of his conviction provides essential context for the hypocrisy the article describes.
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Próspera
13 min read
The article mentions this experimental 'network state' city in Honduras funded by Thiel, Andreessen, and Altman. Most readers won't know the details of this libertarian charter city experiment, which appears to be a hidden motivation behind the Hernández pardon.
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Cartel of the Suns
14 min read
The article references the Trump administration designating 'Cartel de los Soles' as a foreign terrorist organization tied to Maduro. Understanding this alleged Venezuelan military drug trafficking network helps readers evaluate the administration's justification for the Caribbean strikes.
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For years, Donald Trump has fantasized about lawlessly executing drug dealers.
In his second term, he’s made the fantasy a reality, killing drug dealers in a likely illegal airstrike campaign on vessels in international waters. Yet at the same time, Trump last week pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who had just started serving a 45-year federal prison sentence for helping to traffic hundreds of tons of cocaine into the United States during his eight-year tenure as president.
This gaping hypocrisy is just one of a seemingly endless number of contradictory positions, blatant gaslighting, and outright scandals that are roiling the Trump administration as it closes out the year.
From the Epstein files to economic policy, political prosecutions of Trump’s enemies, grifting off the presidency and government-wide corruption, the first year of the second Trump administration is ending on an erratic, chaotic, and dismal note.
There’s another wrinkle to the boat strikes situation that doesn’t quite add up: The administration claims the killing is necessary because “narco-terrorists” and drug cartels are waging war against Americans through their trafficking of deadly drugs. To protect American lives, America needed to take the fight to the traffickers themselves.
As a result, the Trump administration designated one of these cartels — Cartel de los Soles — a “foreign terrorist organization,” claiming that Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro was the cartel’s de facto leader.
The cartel “is headed by Maduro and other high-ranking individuals of the illegitimate Maduro regime who have corrupted Venezuela’s military, intelligence, legislature, and judiciary,” reads a November 16 statement from Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
But compare that with Trump’s recent defense of his pardon of Hernandez.
“He was the president of the country, and they basically said he was a drug dealer because he was the president of the country,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One last week, claiming that the case against Hernandez was a “Biden setup” despite the fact the investigation into Hernandez began before Biden’s tenure as president.
No one in the administration has explained this confounding discrepancy, but there are hints as to why Hernandez is receiving preferential treatment while Maduro —
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