Trump’s Drug War Logic: Pardon the Kingpins, Punish the Powerless

A man at the center of a 400 ton cocaine pipeline is getting a shot at a pardon. You are told this is what a “war on drugs” looks like.

Juan Orlando Hernández was not a random criminal. He was president of Honduras from 2014 to 2022. A U.S. jury convicted him of conspiring to traffic roughly 400 tons of cocaine into the United States. The Justice Department estimated that this equals around 4.5 billion doses of cocaine. Prosecutors said he was at the center of one of the largest and most violent drug trafficking conspiracies in the world.

In plain language, he helped flood American streets with poison and helped kill Americans by the thousands.

He was sentenced to 45 years in U.S. prison.
Now Donald Trump says he plans to pardon him.

So do not tell anyone this is about “stopping drugs”. He is not stopping drugs. He is choosing who is allowed to profit from them.