Donald Trump’s war on drugs is fraught with danger for the president

Back in the dim, distant mists of September, Donald Trump decreed that the Department of Defense, sitting under the purview of the Pentagon, should be rebadged as the Department of War – ideally said with a deep, macho roar like in those action movie trailers.

But something else happened in September that has led some to say that perhaps it should be re-rebadged again. This time, as the department of war crimes.

Three months ago, the defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, ordered a dramatic change in policy to tackle the flow of drugscoming from Venezuela. The US military would be deployed to blow any vessel suspected of carrying narcotics out of the water. A high-speed motor boat was off the Caribbean coast when it was blown to smithereens by a US missile. Hegseth asserted these were drug runners – or narco-terrorists – and this was sending a strong message. Of that there is no doubt.

No evidence has yet been provided that they were drug traffickers, or that they were part of a cartel, or that there were drugs on board, or that the boat was on its way to the US. There has been no oversight of this legally contentious operation. Donald Trump delightedly reposted on his Truth Social platform the video of the vessel meeting its high explosives end as the missile struck its target. The assumption was that all the sailors/narco-baddies aboard went down with the boat.

But last Friday, The Washington Post had its own explosive (sorry) version of events. According to the paper, two of the crew had survived the first missile strike. The allegation is that Hegseth had decreed there should be no survivors and so a second missile was fired to kill the two sailors left clinging to the wreckage. In the most ghastly military euphemism for making sure that everyone is dead, the operation is being described as a “double tap”.

There are Republicans and Democrats who have now come out and said this quite simply constitutes a war crime. When Donald Trump was asked about it on Air Force One, he professed ignorance. He could clearly see the danger of the accusations.

If you have two survivors, why not arrest them, put them on trial, find out who is paying them and who the masterminds of the operation are? Hegseth has denied giving a verbal order to kill everyone aboard. Instead, he’s pointed the finger at the naval commander, Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley, who is now being summoned to speak to congressional leaders about the chain of command that led to this.

Democratic lawmakers who issued a video saying servicemen and women should only follow orders that are in line with the US constitution and military rules of engagement have been threatened with hanging, yes hanging, by Donald Trump on grounds of sedition.

In the cabinet room of the White House this week, Hegseth sitting next to Trump was in full-Maga, no apology, no surrender, all guns blazing defiance. He hadn’t given the order; the admiral has his support. These are bad guys. And this is just the beginning.

Not for the first time there are those predicting Hegseth’s demise. There is a lot of wishful thinking in this from his detractors – and there are plenty of them in Washington.

He also had the embarrassment this week of the Inspector General’s report on the “signalgate” scandal, when top-secret plans to bomb Houthi rebel positions were shared with – err – the editor of The Atlantic magazine.

But we all know that, as far as Trump is concerned, competence is nothing like as valued a commodity as loyalty. And the Fox News anchor who was improbably catapulted to be defence secretary has plenty of that. Trump also won’t want to give in to the baying mob demanding Hegseth’s head. That would look weak. But if Hegseth starts to damage Trump, well, then the calculus changes.

To date, over a hundred sailors from a number of different Venezuelan vessels have been killed by strikes. In Hegseth’s telling, there are a lot more who are going to die.

The problem is that in America, the overwhelming majority of drug deaths are caused by Fentanyl, and there ain’t no Fentanyl coming from Venezuela; there’s cocaine and not that much of it in the grand scheme of things.

And then we get to the complicating bit of the story. If these extra-judicial killings are a show of America’s determination to crack down on drug runners, how can you explain the presidential pardon issued by Donald Trump to Juan Orlando Hernandez?

He’s the former president of Honduras who was sentenced to 45 years imprisonment for drug trafficking. He’d been in prison in West Virginia after a trial in which the court was told how he had protected the Honduran cartels while they were flooding the US with hundreds of tonnes of cocaine. In his trial, the court was also told that he had accepted a million-dollar bribe from the drugs overlord, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, to turn a blind eye to the operations of his cartel.

The judge in Hernandez’s trial said the punishment should serve as a warning to “well-educated, well-dressed” individuals who gain power and think their status insulates them from justice when they do wrong.

But in Trump’s America, it is never that straightforward. Pardons go to those who support and admire Donald J Trump. It is the expression of the purest political power that a president can pardon whoever he likes. And Donald Trump is doing just that. So in recent weeks, we have had a slew of pardons given to Trump allies – and now the former president of Honduras, who was charged after an extensive CIA and FBI operation, walks free too. The Hernandez family have been lavish in their praise and fulsome in their admiration. And anyway, the prosecution of Hernandez took place while Joe Biden was president, so it must have been politically motivated.

But if you oppose the president, you can expect the worst.

Maybe the extraordinary US military build-up off the coast of Venezuela is purely about drug trafficking, but it becomes ever harder to believe that that is what it’s all about.

The Venezuelan dictator, Nicolas Maduro, must be wishing he’d been nicer to Donald Trump in the past.