A historic era in U.S. politics ended on Wednesday afternoon with the Senate’s vote to repeal the blanket authorization Congress had given President George W. Bush in 2002 to deploy the military against the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. The repeal must still pass the House and be finalized with President Biden’s signature, but the vote marked a formal, belated recognition of what most parties now recognize as an overly broad ceding of authority at best and an enormous, deadly mistake at worst.
Then, a few hours later, a new report from Rolling Stone emerged. Former president Donald Trump, gearing up his bid to be reinstated in his former position, has been “asking policy advisers for a range of military options aimed at taking on Mexican drug cartels, including strikes that are not sanctioned by Mexico’s government, according to two sources familiar with the situation,” the magazine’s Asawin Suebsaeng and Adam Rawnsley write.
It’s hard not to see the parallels here. In each case we have a president leveraging public fear to brandish an iron fist. And, in each case, we have a rhetorical case that’s shaky at best.
We will note at the outset that one report about Trump’s intent is not by itself definitive. Trump explores any number of ideas, all the time, riffing with wait staff and Mar-a-Lago customers about how best to exercise the power of the world’s most powerful country. But the Rolling Stone report comports with what Trump has said publicly.
In his speech in Waco, Tex., last weekend, Trump insisted that the number of people dying from drug overdoses was far higher than what’s reported — and that it was a threat akin to a military assault.
“They keep talking about a hundred-thousand people, 75,000 people,” Trump said. “I’ve been hearing that number for 15 years. It’s hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people, probably a half-a-million people, and nobody wants to say it. There’s no army that could ever do damage to us like that still.”
In January, Trump pledged that, if he is reelected, it would “be the policy of the United States to take down the cartels, just as we took down ISIS and the ISIS caliphate,” which, of course, was done with military operations.
Trump allies like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) have argued in favor of military operations against Mexico. According to Suebsaeng and Rawnsley, Trump was briefed on a document published in October arguing in support of “wag[ing] war on transnational drug cartels.” Its author was Ken Cuccinelli, who served in the Department of Homeland Security when Trump was president.
The trigger for all of this drone-strike-rattling is the rise in overdose deaths from fentanyl. In 2016, overdoses from synthetic opioids, mostly fentanyl, overtook deaths from prescription opioid overdoses (like oxycodone). In the years since the number has spiked, probably powered in part by the emergence of the coronavirus pandemic.
Not surprisingly, Trump’s hyperbole is incorrect. The number of overdose deaths has not been 100,000 for 15 years, nor is there any indication that it is underestimated to the extent he suggests.
Why is Trump suggesting it’s so high? In part because this is what he always does. But in part because he wants to exaggerate both the threat the country faces and, relatedly, the failure of the Biden administration to address that threat. That deaths from fentanyl surged when he was president is not something he’s likely to admit, though the Rolling Stone report quotes one aide who describes tackling drug cartels as a “missed opportunity.”
The threat posed by fentanyl is certainly real, as those overdose death figures suggest. But the drug is also deeply intertwined with a number of the Republican Party’s broader political priorities. Much of the fentanyl that is available in the United States is imported, often smuggled into the country across the U.S.-Mexico border. This makes it ripe for “the border is too porous” argumentation, though fentanyl — in the form of small, easy-to-hide pills — is usually smuggled through existing checkpoints and often by U.S. citizens.
Fentanyl is also often sourced to China, as detailed in a 2020 report from the Drug Enforcement Administration. That allows the drug crisis to be framed not only as a predatory action from Mexican drug cartels but as a geopolitical threat from America’s most potent international foe. It’s not just that fentanyl is killing Americans, in other words, it’s that the drug can be positioned as an attack on the country by China that’s enabled by lax border policies. So it is positioned that way.
We’ve seen drug crises before, of course, and even rhetoric about deploying the U.S. military in response. The crack-cocaine epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s contributed to a huge surge in crime, including a spike in homicides. There were ancillary deaths, too, from overdoses and illness. In 1989, Tom Clancy wrote the novel “Clear and Present Danger,” which speculated about an illicit deployment of military force against Colombian cartels; it became a film starring Harrison Ford.
(There has been a lot of analysis about the diverging responses to the crack and opioid-fentanyl surges, analyses that justifiably note that the former mostly affected Black Americans and the latter Whites. In 2021, Black Americans had higher rates of overdose deaths from fentanyl than did White Americans, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, blurring that distinction at least somewhat.)
The appeal to Trump of speculating about pushing troops into Tamaulipas is the same appeal that’s on display in that movie trailer: a macho flexing of muscle against a vilified enemy. The 2020 DEA report notes that production shifted from China to India and that fentanyl is also smuggled into the United States from Canada (albeit at a smaller scale). Yet India and Canada don’t capture the American imagination the way China and “Mexican cartels” do.
Among Trump’s first words when he announced his first presidential candidacy in 2015 were to disparage the Mexican government for (he claimed without evidence) sending criminals across the border into the United States. Mexico has always been a target for his rhetoric, and one that appeals to his base.
There’s an irony here, though. Trump also likes to brag about being the only recent president not to have initiated a new military effort. He said as much in Waco: “I’m proud to be the only president in decades who did not start a new war.” It’s a point of pride among his supporters, though the claim itself is inaccurate, but it’s also conditional: Does anyone actually doubt that Trump would eagerly deploy strikes against criminal organizations in Mexico, given his rhetoric and his track record?
The lesson from America’s post-9/11 interventions is again instructive. The United States overtook Afghanistan soon after the 2001 terrorist attacks but found itself unable to uproot the country’s rampant opium trade. There were simply too many structural forces working against them: economic benefits to farmers, payoffs to officials, existing smuggling networks. Should we assume that limited strikes in Mexico would be effective in a way that entirely occupying Afghanistan wasn’t?
Our deployment to Afghanistan was at least directly tied to 9/11. The invasion of Iraq powered by that 2002 congressional action wasn’t. It depended heavily on dubious political rhetoric and the ingrained biases of the American people against Saddam Hussein and his government. There’s been a lot of recent analysis of how Americans were convinced that invading Iraq 20 years ago this month was justified and would be easy, analysis that maps at least to some extent on the idea that we should deploy military forces into Mexico to address a weapon of mass death, fentanyl.
Trump, of course, supported the Iraq invasion. At least until it became unpopular.
