What did Donald Trump do today?

He pardoned and politically endorsed an actual honest-to-God South American narcostate kingpin.

Since early September, Trump has ordered airstrikes on 21 different boats in the Caribbean, killing an estimated 83 people. The only justification Trump has offered is his claim that all of the boats he's ordered destroyed were Venezuelans transporting drugs. In fact, he's made the preposterous claim that each boat destroyed somehow saves 25,000 American lives from a drug overdose. (About 82,000 Americans die annually from overdoses, and many of those are from prescription drugs. More to the point, very few of the drugs Americans overdose on from come from Venezuela.) 

Trump has refused to show the American public, or its representatives in Congress, any evidence as to how or if he knew the boats he destroyed were carrying drugs. From the start, these attacks appeared to be illegal, and either a war crime or simple murder. It is not legal under any theory of international law to kill people simply for smuggling drugs, even if they were actually doing that. When nations are obeying the rule of law, actual smuggling vessels are interdicted by navies or national coast authorities.

Today, however, reporting sourced to people inside the military chain of command revealed that Trump and his Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had issued specific orders to kill survivors of the attacks. So-called "double-tap" strikes against targets that are now completely helpless are flatly illegal. The implication from the sources was that Trump's interests are best served if there are no survivors because if there were, they could undermine his administration's claims that they were engaged in smuggling. (There's already circumstantial evidence to that effect. The first boat Trump attacked was carrying 11 people, which makes very little sense in the context of smuggling drugs.)

That supposed commitment to stopping the drug trade is the backdrop for a pardon Trump announced today, for Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras. Hernández was convicted in American federal court of drug trafficking and sentenced to 45 years in prison. The evidence prosecutors introduced showed that Hernández had taken millions of dollars in bribes from the infamous Sinaloa cartel, using his government role to shield them from arrest and prosecution.

The trafficking that Hernández was charged with—which is far less than the amount actually suspected—was 400 tons of cocaine—or, as the DOJ put it at the time of his conviction, about 4.5 billion doses. 

 

But in his message announcing the pardon, Trump claimed (without evidence) that Hernández had been, "according to many people that I greatly respect, treated very harshly and unfairly." Trump also endorsed a Hernández protege, Nasry Asfura, in the upcoming Honduran elections.  

 

In other words, Trump is simultaneously ordering facially illegal airstrikes on Venezuelan citizens to fight drug smuggling, while pardoning and lending political support to an actual drug kingpin.

Why does this matter?

• This is the last person in the universe you'd pardon if you cared about drug trafficking. 

• This makes a complete mockery of American law enforcement. 

• If there were a reason other than corruption for this pardon, we'd be hearing about it.