We covered this last month when Rolling Stone reported that Donald Trump, a seditionist, was once again asking campaign policy advisers to draft military options for conducting air strikes or other operations against the cartels. The notion of bombing Mexico in a war on drug traffickers is self-evidently stupid, and it gets worse the more you think about it. Even if you can get past the idea of the U.S. military conducting strikes against Mexican targets without Mexico’s consent, there’s very little to strike at. Unless you plan on leveling entire Mexican towns, aka, the Kissinger doctrine of Screw Everyone and Everything, the premise would be to spend tens of millions of dollars in individual airstrikes to take out random apartment buildings and AirBnBs.
The fentanyl trade has Mexican drug cartels as one stop among many. The actual chemicals themselves are smuggled to Mexico from China, and Republicans are not, so far, proposing we bomb the factories actually producing the stuff. Smugglers in Mexico then have to do little but mix the final product and press it into pills, a process so simple that it can be done anywhere and everywhere. The finished pills are then smuggled across the border with the cooperation of American criminals; Mexico is not, so far, contemplating military strikes against U.S. police union heads or white supremacist groups, even though the U.S. market for illegal drugs has done far more damage to Mexico than it has the United States.
“What if we just bomb them all” is the kind of boot fart thinking that the most craven conservative faux-intellectuals pipe up with roughly six times a week, and “What if we bomb Mexico to hurt the drug cartels?” has gone from a Donald Trump post-dinner burp to a universal party belief in less time than it’s taken to investigate an attempted coup.
This happens every time. Every single time Donald Trump mumbles some half-assed scheme cribbed from the only people in Republicanism craven enough to work for him, within weeks, it becomes new party doctrine.
It’s not that Donald Trump can run a hotel just a block from the White House, one catering specifically to prospective supplicants, and have the entire Republican Party insist that that couldn’t possibly be corruption, not like Hunter Biden selling a painting might be. It’s that the party now backs Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and backs pardons for violent coup conspirators, now that Donald Trump’s unparalleled corruption has forced them to take sides on the issue.
None of these people are going to be able to make a dent against Donald Trump in the primaries, because not a damn one of them is willing to differentiate themselves from Trump’s radicalism, anti-Americanism, and crimes.
Bombing Mexican apartment buildings to take out gangs of pill-pressing smugglers is not a realistic option. Weakening the demand for fentanyl on this side of the border would do much more to make the trade less profitable, but Republicans don’t want to do that because it reeks of social spending. “What if we just bomb them all,” though, is an idea every fascist and fascism-agnostic Republican can get behind.
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We speak with Anderson Clayton, the 25-year-old chair of North Carolina’s Democratic Party. Clayton has a big-picture plan for 2024, and explains the granular changes needed to get out the vote on college campuses and in the rural communities of the Tar Heel State.
