What did Donald Trump do today?

He declared fentanyl a "weapon of mass destruction" after pardoning one of its biggest traffickers. 

Today, Trump signed a memo declaring the common post-surgical painkiller fentanyl to be a "weapon of mass destruction." That puts it rhetorically alongside hydrogen bombs, nerve gas, and weaponized anthrax. But the declaration has no real legal meaning: the fentanyl is a legal and commonly used drug when prescribed, and selling or trafficking it without a prescription was already illegal.

Instead, Trump seems to be trying to convince Americans that there is a sinister military plot against the United States being carried out by outside enemies—one that can only be fought by a militaristic response, like unlawful airstrikes against supposed "narcoterrorists" in the Caribbean. Another such strike was carried out today.

It's true that people die from fentanyl overdoses: about 47,000 last year, although the number of deaths per year is dropping sharply. Almost nothing else Trump or his administration has claimed about the drug is true. It is not made in or smuggled from Venezuela, and Trump has not personally saved 258 million Americans from overdosing on it, as his attorney general claimed with a straight face in May.

Instead, fentanyl kills Americans who become addicted to it and accidentally take too much. As with other opioids like heroin, morphine, and oxycodone, it's possible to overcome that addiction with drug rehabilitation programs like the ones Trump has slashed billions of dollars from since returning to office. Of course, nobody wants to be addicted to drugs, but American consumer demand for opioids is what drives smuggling.

That said, there are criminals who traffic in enormous quantities of fentanyl. One of them, Ross Ulbricht, was convicted in 2015 of masterminding a "dark web" marketplace, Silk Road, that became known as "the Amazon of drugs" and helped launch the first wave of imported fentanyl into the United States. Ulbricht took a percentage of each transaction and became fantastically wealthy running a drug empire that rivaled the biggest South American cartels.

Trump commuted Ulbricht's 20-year prison sentence on the second day of his second term.
 

Why does this matter?

• Drug abuse is a serious enough problem that a president should probably at least be pretending to try to solve it.