Trump is Cool With Kingpins as Long as They Are Rightwinged
Farmers protest against President Donald Trump's pardon of Honduras' former President Juan Orlando Hernandez in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, Thursday, Dec. 4, 2025. (AP Photo/Moises Castillo)
President Trump’s decision to pardon Juan Orlando Hernández reveals deep contradictions within his supposed efforts to fight drug trafficking in the United States.
Orlando Hernández was elected president of Honduras in 2014. Swiftly after the end of his second term in 2022, he was extradited to the United States to face charges on his participation in a drug trafficking conspiracy that enabled the hundreds of thousands of kilos of cocaine into the U.S. In tandem, Trump has labeled Nicolás Maduro’s administration in Venezuela as a “foreign terrorist organization” for its alleged involvement with drug-trafficking.
Although Orlando Hernández received a 24-year-long sentence in 2024, last week Trump promised him a pardon just a year into his imprisonment. The former Honduran president led one of the largest scale violent drug-trafficking operations seen in U.S. courts, yet Trump has chastised the prosecution for treating Orlando Hernández “very harshly and unfairly.”
Trump and the disgraced ex-president enjoyed a friendly relationship during their overlapping terms during the first Trump Administration. During his time in office Orlando Hernández was socially conservative, cementing a total abortion ban without exceptions into the Honduran constitution, as well as a ban on emergency contraceptives and same-sex marriage. He belonged to the National Party, which has historically been tied to the U.S. agriculture industry through supporting U.S.-based fruit companies and suppressing labor unrest.
Trump’s line of reasoning regarding the pardon is difficult to follow; perhaps he sympathizes on a personal level as a fellow world leader convicted of multiple felonies.
Or, perhaps Trump relates to being a fellow victim to the boogie man of the “radical left” that so often ails him. Shortly after the pardon’s announcement, Orlando Hernández’s wife thanked Trump and blamed her husband’s conviction on the “radical left” inside and outside of the country in a press conference. The ambiguous boogie man seemingly knows no geo-political bounds.
The duplicitous nature of Trump’s political favoritism of Orlando Hernández is revealed when
juxtaposed with his foreign policy regarding Venezuela and its president, Maduro—a leader who presents himself as the heir to Venezuela’s socialist project—who has also been indicted by the federal government for large-scale corruption involving drug trafficking in 2020.
Maduro frequently invokes socialist ideals to frame himself as the protector of the Venezuelan revolutionary project. Yet his administration is authoritarian, jailing dissidents and even allowing pro-government vigilantes to attack peaceful protestors. Under his leadership, social programs and democratic institutions have been castrated, while corruption and inequality deepens.
Despite abandoning leftist principles, Maduro’s government still continues to drape itself in socialist rhetoric, which might be a reason for Trump’s anger.
Tensions between Maduro and Trump have been steadily rising, after Trump claimed Maduro’s administration was working alongside the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragu to coordinate drug trafficking and illegal migration into the United States. However, these claims have been
contested by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, which has not found a link between the two parties.
Trump ordered a series of drone strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean beginning in September, which have killed 83 people thus far in an attempt to curb perceived Venezuelan facilitation of transnational criminal operations. There has also been an increased presence of
U.S. military warships near the Venezuelan coast.
Maduro believes the rising military presence is an attempt to force him out of office, and as of just a few days ago, Trump stated U.S. aircrafts should be barred from entering Venezuelan airspace.
The banner of right-wing ideology may earn you a pardon, but clearly the socialist emblem will earn you no such thing. Trump’s selective outrage reveals that his fight against drug trafficking is not rooted in principle, but in alliances and ideology.