At War With Cartels

Erick Erickson
Thu, 04 Dec 2025 23:00:00 -0800
Opinion

I am very willing to criticize President Donald Trump. From tariffs to some of his pardons to his behavior, I am not willing to serve as an apologist or yes-man. He is surrounded by those who will not truly challenge him. We all know the difference between superficial pretenses of pushback and genuine pushback. I suspect he doesn't actually like pushback once he has embraced a bad idea like tariffs.

While I am willing to criticize the president, and such criticisms have cost me jobs and opportunities over the years, there are also many things he has done that I agree with. As an aside, the poor man zone of punditry on the left and right is being the person willing to praise and criticize from inside the tent. Going all in and all against is what sells. Nuance does not. But let me now make a nuanced case for the president.

The legally meritorious argument is simply stated. Narcotics trafficking is a federal crime. Drug traffickers have been running drugs into the United States for decades and it has all along been treated as a crime. Recently, the Trump Administration quietly took into custody fifty-five senior Mexican cartel members, who are now being housed in supermax prisons. Therefore, because Congress has designated narcotics trafficking across borders as a crime, the President lacks the power to change a crime into an act of war. As a result, blowing up the boats of narcotics traffickers is not a legal act and redesigning them as "narcoterrorists" does not get around legal definitions that make the act a crime, not an act of war.
Updated: Fri Dec 05, 2025

I am very willing to criticize President Donald Trump. From tariffs to some of his pardons to his behavior, I am not willing to serve as an apologist or yes-man. He is surrounded by those who will not truly challenge him. We all know the difference between superficial pretenses of pushback and genuine pushback. I suspect he doesn't actually like pushback once he has embraced a bad idea like tariffs.

While I am willing to criticize the president, and such criticisms have cost me jobs and opportunities over the years, there are also many things he has done that I agree with. As an aside, the poor man zone of punditry on the left and right is being the person willing to praise and criticize from inside the tent. Going all in and all against is what sells. Nuance does not. But let me now make a nuanced case for the president.

The legally meritorious argument is simply stated. Narcotics trafficking is a federal crime. Drug traffickers have been running drugs into the United States for decades and it has all along been treated as a crime. Recently, the Trump Administration quietly took into custody fifty-five senior Mexican cartel members, who are now being housed in supermax prisons. Therefore, because Congress has designated narcotics trafficking across borders as a crime, the President lacks the power to change a crime into an act of war. As a result, blowing up the boats of narcotics traffickers is not a legal act and redesigning them as "narcoterrorists" does not get around legal definitions that make the act a crime, not an act of war.

I must dissent.

Over the past several years, we have reliable and credible information that the Chinese communists have funneled the chemicals and materials into Central and South America to make drugs much more potent and lethal. The drug traffickers are entering the United States and both addicting and killing Americans with the drugs. Additionally, over the past decade, as the United States focused more on the Middle East than the Western Hemisphere, the drug cartels in Central and South America have increasingly intermingled with various governmental regimes, which are complicit in the trafficking of drugs and the killing of American citizens.

The drug traffickers as a stand-alone enterprise, may be criminal narcotics traffickers, but in collaboration with the Chinese communists and nation-state regimes south of our border, they have become narcoterrorists. Kill them. The President is reasserting American dominance of the Western Hemisphere and that must mean breaking up the ties between the drug cartels and nation-states.

During the Biden Administration, though they have attempted to revise history, Biden named Kamala Harris as his border czar. She went to Central America to explore the "root causes" of the mass illegal migration stream headed into the United States. Cartel and gang violence dominated the discussions, but the Biden administration treated Nayib Bukele as a pariah for solving his nation's crime and violence problem. Bukele transformed El Salvador from one of the most violent to one of the safest nations in Central America. He showed that yes, contrary to what Democrats claim, we can incarcerate out of the crime and violence problem.

Not only did the Biden administration treat Bukele as a pariah, but they lied about the wave of mass illegal immigration into the United States, insisting the borders were secure, and did little to stem the tide of fentanyl and other drugs flowing into the United States. Donald Trump has closed the border, embraced Bukele, and gone to war against the cartels that were already at war with us.

Just because they speak Spanish, not Arabic, and do not blow themselves and us up, makes them no less terrorist enterprises than Al Qaeda or ISIS, but unlike those Islamic organizations, the cartels also control nation-states through proxies. President Trump is right to wage war on them. But it is also why he should not have pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was one of the drug cartel ring leaders. The President's policies are right, but he keeps sending the wrong and mixed messages