An analyst Tuesday called President Donald Trump's war on drugs "just incoherent" — and revealed what his strategy might actually show about Trump's motives.
Salon columnist Heather Digby Parton wrote how Trump's pardon of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández counters his strategy to stop Venezuelan “narco-terrorists” following multiple lethal boat strikes in the Caribbean Sea, just off the coast of Venezuela. Last week, Trump gave the Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro a week to leave the country, after accusations "mostly related to money laundering and corruption," she argued.
"In fact, the cocaine drug trade from Venezuela doesn’t even come to America; it’s directed almost entirely at Europe," Digby Parton said. The Trump administration has indicated it is trying to stop fentanyl from reaching the U.S. with its attacks, but the drug is "almost exclusively smuggled over land from Mexico."
The pardon of Hernández has shown cracks in Trump's stance on targeting the drug trade, as "what used to be a metaphorical war on drugs is now a real war."
"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," Digby Parton wrote.
It might not have been just about drug trafficking, she added.
"As Will Saletan pointed out at the Bulwark, Trump has made a habit of publicly threatening countries if they don’t let far-right politicians — including Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, France’s Marine Le Pen and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu — off the hook. Donald Trump identifies with them — and he admits it freely," Digby Parton wrote.
"So it’s really not much more complicated than this: It’s all about him. It’s always all about him," she added.