In his presidential cabinet meeting on Tuesday, Donald Trump said the US military will begin strikes on targets within Venezuela “soon”, lamenting in a long soliloquy the “hundreds of thousands” of deaths in the US due to the ingestion of fentanyl.
While it is true that just more than 100,000 Americans per year have died from an overdose of the synthetic opioid since 2021, according to the National Institutes of Health, there is no evidence of any trafficking of fentanyl from Venezuela, according to the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).
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Tuesday’s regular roundtable of his Secretaries complimenting his every policy focused mainly on the controversial bombings of Venezuelan boats that Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth insisted were drug runners, with Hegseth contending that military intelligence knew exactly who the boat passengers were, where they were from, and what was on board.
“Those white bags [on the military’s night-vision recordings of the strikes] were not gifts from Santa Claus,” Hegseth quipped at the meeting.
Trump wound up the cabinet meeting by responding to criticism that Hegseth’s department blew up two surviving passengers of a Venezuelan boat in a “double-tap” strike. Deflecting attention from the issue of the illegality of the strikes, Trump launched into a description about how young Americans “just looking to have a little fun” end up dead after ingesting a “pin head” of fentanyl.
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According to the DEA, the vast majority of the opioid analgesic (also used widely in hospitals for pain relief after surgery and for cancer patients) comes from Mexico, with ingredients arriving there from China.
“Illicit fentanyl, primarily manufactured in foreign clandestine labs and smuggled into the United States through Mexico, is being distributed across the country and sold on the illegal drug market,” the DEA writes on its web site.
“While Mexico and China are the primary source countries for fentanyl and fentanyl-related substances trafficked directly into the United States, India is emerging as a source for finished fentanyl powder and fentanyl precursor chemicals,” the agency writes in a white paper on the issue.
Attorney General Pam Bondi, who oversees the DEA as head of the Justice Department, was at the table at the cabinet meeting but remained silent about the issue.
Trump went on to say that the Department of Defense will move on to attack land targets in Venezeula soon. He said military intelligence knows where the drug cartels are operating there, who they are and where they live.
“It’s a lot easier to hit them on land,” Trump said.
As regards his knowledge aof the “double-tap” strike, where survivors were hanging onto the hull of the destroyed vessel, Trump said, “Someone asked me about the second strike, nobody told me about a second strike.”
Asked the same, Hegseth responded:
“I didn’t stick around for the two hours, a couple hours (to see the second strike)…” Hegeth added, saying he was very busy and contradicting his initial remarks that the second strike never happened and were “fake news”
“I was told that [Admiral Frank Bradley]… then sunk the boat and eliminated the threat,” he continued.
With many in the legislature calling on him to resign, including those from his own Republican party, Hegseth will be called to Capitol Hill this week to answer questions about that second strike, as will Admiral Bradley.
“He made it look like he was in charge of the whole strike until things started going sideways, then he threw the admiral under the bus,” Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) told CNN on Tuesday night.
“Hegseth shouldn’t be allowed within 1,000 yards of the Pentagon. This is the exact opposite of the guy you want in that position of power. He has access to the nuclear codes, and he spends half the day tweeting memes.”
