SENDING MIXED SIGNALS

Trump’s Big Anti-Drug Brag Blown Up by His Own Pardon Frenzy

The president swore to crack down on illegal drugs, but instead he keeps granting clemency to kingpins.

President Donald Trump’s pardon of a former Honduran president who trafficked hundreds of tons of cocaine into the U.S. is just the president’s latest act of clemency, undermining his claims that he’s tough on drugs.

A new analysis by The Washington Post found that Trump, who has ordered a series of deadly strikes on boats in the Caribbean as part of a supposed crackdown on illegal drugs from Venezuela, has released nearly 100 people convicted of drug-related crimes.

SURE

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During his first term, he granted pardons or commutations to almost 90 people for drug-related crimes. Since taking office in January, he has freed 10 more, including pardoning former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández and Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht.

He also commuted the prison sentences of Chicago gang leader Larry Hoover and Baltimore drug kingpin Garnet Gilbert Smith.

The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.

At the same time, Trump has authorized the Pentagon to fire on 23 small boats in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific, killing 87 people to date, by claiming—without providing evidence—that the boats were manned by “narco-terrorists” trafficking illegal drugs to the U.S.

In fact, the first boat, which was hit on Sept. 2, was bound for Suriname, Navy Admiral Frank Bradley told lawmakers last week. Drug trafficking routes that go through Suriname are mainly intended for Europe, CNN reported.

Bradley nevertheless argued the Sept. 2 strike was valid because any drugs on board could have ultimately made their way to the U.S. The attack killed all 11 passengers on board, including two survivors of the initial strike who clung to the wreckage for more than 40 minutes before being killed by a follow-up strike.

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Pentagon officials have not provided the public with any evidence that the 20-plus boats destroyed to date were actually carrying drugs, or that the people killed were drug dealers.

In fact, people familiar with the classified mission briefings told The New York Times that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth doesn’t know who exactly has been killed in the strikes.

Chief Pentagon Spokesman Sean Parnell told the Daily Beast in an email, “We have consistently said that our intelligence did indeed confirm that the individuals involved in these drug operations were narco-terrorists, and we stand by that assessment.”

That tough-on-narco-terrorists posturing is hard to square with Trump’s pardoning of drug offenders, sources told The Washington Post.

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Jeffrey Singer, a drug policy expert at the Cato Institute, said there was “no consistency” when it came to Trump and drug policy. Last year, Trump said he backed Florida’s ballot measure to legalize recreational marijuana, but then last month he signed a law that stiffened restrictions on hemp.

Liz Oyer, who served as the Justice Department’s pardon attorney from April 2022 to March 2025, told the Post, “The pardoning of drug kingpins is virtually unheard of.”

Hernández and Ulbricht—whose black-market site on the dark web generated hundreds of millions of dollars in sales of illegal goods and services, including drugs—both received pardons outside of the typical review process undertaken by career DOJ officials, according to the Post.

Speaking to reporters last week, Trump insisted that Hernández’s arrest and conviction was a “Biden set-up,” even though the prosecution began during Trump’s first term.

Hernández was extradited to the U.S. in 2022 and ultimately sentenced to 45 years in prison for abusing his position and accepting bribes from drug traffickers moving about 4.5 billion individual doses of cocaine.

A Honduran accountant who was personally responsible for counting $25,000 worth of bribes that Hernández accepted from traffickers testified in a separate trial that Hernández said, “We are going to stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses, and they’re never even going to know it.”

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Trump, however, claimed that the court “basically said he was a drug dealer because he was the president of the country.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt also argued last week that Trump was defending “the United States homeland” while also correcting the “wrongs” of the “weaponized Justice Department” under former President Joe Biden.

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