'I hate it': Senate Republicans say Trump's pardon of drug kingpin undermines his agenda

President Donald Trump's recent pardon of an international drug kingpin has ruffled feathers among members of his own party, according to a new report.

The National Review's Audrey Fahlberg reported Tuesday that Trump's pardon of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández has caused consternation among several Republicans in the U.S. Senate, who say that the clemency measure takes the wind out of the sails of his stated goal of combating drug traffickers. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who is retiring from the Senate in 2026, said the pardon was "horrible optics" and sent a "mixed message" about the administration's goals.

"I hate it. It’s a horrible message," Tillis said.

Hernández was sentenced in 2024 to a 45-year prison sentence for conspiring to move 400 tons of cocaine into the United States. The Department of Justice's (DOJ) sentencing statement noted that the former Honduran leader's conspiracy amounted to more than 4.5 billion individual doses of cocaine. One of the witnesses in the trial said that Hernández told one of his co-conspirators that he wanted to "shove the drugs right up the noses of the gringos."

"From what I’ve read about the Honduran president’s role in funneling cocaine to the United States, he does not seem like a good candidate for a pardon to me," Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) told the National Review.

"It’s hard to reconcile that pardon with the repeated emphasis on drug trafficking as a rationale for our Venezuela interest — period," said Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.), who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Last weekend, Trump defended his pardon of the former two-term Honduran leader, calling his sentence a "setup" by former President Joe Biden's DOJ.

"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 said on Air Force One. "And they said it was a Biden administration setup, and I looked at the facts and I agreed with them.”

Click here to read the National Review's article in full (subscription required).