In a gobsmacking interview launched on Tuesday, President Donald Trump was requested about his eyebrow-raising pardon of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández.
He was convicted of working an enormous, state-protected cocaine trafficking operation that funneled 400 tons of medication into the USA whereas he concurrently took bribes from cartels and weaponized Honduran safety forces to guard the commerce.
Because the Justice Division stated on the time, this was “one of many largest and most violent drug-trafficking conspiracies on the planet”—and that wasn’t hyperbole.
That 400 tons amounted to 4.5 billion particular person doses of cocaine. Hernández as soon as boasted, “We’re going to stuff the medication up the gringos’ noses, they usually’re by no means even going to comprehend it.”
Even within the pantheon of questionable Trump strikes, this one stands out.
Trump has spent years invoking drug trafficking as justification for tariffs in opposition to Canada, China, and Mexico, to not point out his undeclared and illegal naval assaults on Venezuelan fishing boats.
Requested by Politico’s Dasha Burns how this squared along with his supposed “zero tolerance on drug trafficking,” Trump’s reply was befuddling.
“Effectively I don’t know him, and I do know little or no about him apart from folks stated it was like an Obama-Biden kind setup,” he blathered.
What the what?
The presidential pardon is absolute, however it’s ideally used to right miscarriages of justice, present mercy in extraordinary circumstances, or resolve inequities the authorized system failed to handle. Trump, after all, has used it to reward allies, peddle influence, and likely profit. His pardon tempo has been completely frantic, one of many few areas of presidency the place he can act with out interference and the place his authoritarian instincts run free.
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In accordance with CNN, Trump pardoned more people within the first 30 days of his newest time period than Barack Obama did in eight years as president. And so far, he has pardoned over 1,500 folks in 2025 alone, in comparison with President George W. Bush’s 189, Obama’s 212, and President Joe Biden’s 80 whole pardons whereas in workplace.
But it takes a sure sort of callous incompetence handy out a pardon after which declare, “I don’t know him” and “I do know little or no about him.” Somebody advised him Hernández was “arrange” by Obama and Biden? How about perhaps you have got your employees examine the matter, discuss to prosecutors, learn the f’n Wikipedia entry—something!
That “somebody” feeding him that nonsense is none apart from dirty trickster Roger Stone, the longtime GOP ratfucker and self-described political hitman who has orbited Republican scandals since the Nixon era. Stone lobbied Trump for months on Hernández’s behalf. Stone doesn’t do something without spending a dime, and he’s not silly.
However it’s one factor to be manipulated by the individuals who have mastered working round Trump’s more and more fragile cognition. It’s one other to go on digital camera and shrug your shoulders and say, “I don’t know nothin’ about it besides what my pal Roger advised me.”
In a sane world, this may finish a presidency. In a sane world, it might be merchandise 47,335 within the lengthy listing of issues that ought to have ended his presidency.
However this can merely deepen the anxiousness Republicans are already feeling after their disastrous electoral performance final month. They’ve begun difficult Trump on the Venezuelan boat strikes, his try and extend ACA subsidies, and the Epstein files. That listing will develop because the GOP’s political survival turns into more and more tied to how far they’ll crawl away from him.
Trump handing out pardons to infamous drug traffickers? Republicans usually are not going to line as much as defend him on this—particularly when the president himself can’t be bothered to justify it.
