President Donald Trump casually disclosed his plans for his next military campaign not in an address to Congress or the American people, but in a friendly conversation with Fox News host Sean Hannity.
A day after he made the bombshell admission that he plans to run Venezuela for years, Trump suggested he would invade Mexico next.
The reveal came while Trump and Hannity were discussing Saturday’s shock capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who has been brought to New York to face drug charges.
Trump—who campaigned on a promise to end foreign wars, not start them—told Hannity that the legally dubious Venezuela operation was not a “hard decision” because Maduro had “killed a lot of people, sent a lot of bad people into our country,” and was a “big drug pusher.”
“You see that because all of the boats we shot down, they came out of Venezuela,” he said. “We knocked out 97 percent of the drugs coming in by water. And we are going to start now hitting land with regard to the cartels. The cartels are running Mexico.”
The president has claimed repeatedly that his missile strikes on dozens of alleged Venezuelan drug boats stopped the vast majority of drugs entering the U.S. by sea, saving hundreds of thousands of lives.
But even if those boats were smuggling drugs—a claim the administration has yet to back up—most Venezuelan drug boats carry cocaine bound for Europe, not the fentanyl responsible for the majority of American drug overdose deaths, NBC News reported in November.
Trump previously said he would target Colombia next in his supposed crusade against drugs, and he was originally planning a second wave of attacks against Venezuela, he revealed in a late-night Truth Social post.
But after a friendly call with the country’s president and concessions from the interim government of Venezuela, he has apparently turned his sights on Mexico, whose cartels first began manufacturing the synthetic opioid fentanyl around 2014.
It’s not the first time he has threatened military action against the cartels, which are not running Mexico.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum walked a tight diplomatic tightrope for months with Trump as he threatened to impose tariffs on Mexican products and send American troops into Mexico to stop the flow of fentanyl.
Sheinbaum has assured Trump that she has sought to tackle the drug problem stemming from her country, with authorities frequently arresting smugglers and others related to organized crime near the Southern border.
Trump nevertheless insisted during his conversation with Hannity that “it’s very sad to watch and see what happened to that country.”
“The cartels are running and they’re killing 250, 300,000 people in our country every single year,” he said, parroting claims he made about Venezuela and Maduro.
The president has repeatedly insisted that 300,000 Americans die annually from drug overdoses, even though fewer than 80,000 overdose deaths were reported last year.
He also undermined his claims that he’s tough on drugs by pardoning nearly 100 people convicted of drug-related crimes. During his first term, he granted pardons or commutations to almost 90 people for drug-related crimes, and since taking office in January, he has freed 10 more.
Those include former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who trafficked hundreds of tons of cocaine into the U.S., and Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, whose black-market site on the dark web generated hundreds of millions of dollars in sales of illegal goods and services, including drugs.
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