Our Very Weird Political Moment

From Josh Marshall:

[there] is a feeling of repetition. Everything I see in our politics right now — or at least at the pinnacle where Donald Trump dominates all the visuals and attention — has a feeling of drift, spectacle and fragmentation. 

Trump’s ballroom epitomizes it — crass, stupid, vulgar, unacceptable and yet ultimately meaningless. It’s the full-size version of having his stacked Kennedy Center board, of which he is the chairman, rename the institution after him. ... 

Then there’s his new hall of presidents, a sick-burn tweet storm embedded on a wall of what remains of the White House. 

These all have the feeling of a man who is bored, tapped out, losing coherence and energy and who others are trying to keep distracted. 

The economy continues to reel and lurch under a weight-vest of tariffs and trade wars. 

Immigrants and brown people of all sorts are still menaced by ICE. The innocent are harassed; the guilty are pardoned. Alleged drug runners, but perhaps mere fishermen and boaters, are blown out of the water from a distance by U.S. Navy drones. 

All of it continues, and the country remains in the throes of a battle for the survival of civic democracy. 

In many ways, the predation remains at its highest point — because much of it has happened, has been consolidated, and people now react on the basis of those things having happened. 

Indeed, we may now be careening toward a war with Venezuela because one of Stephen Miller’s fiendish gambits directed at Mexico has metastasized in the general chaos into a regime change war against Venezuela. 

What is uncanny about this though is that it’s incomplete and in key ways faltering. It’s also terribly unpopular. I cannot think of a single facet of the Trumpism of Practice circa 2025 that has not been rejected by the public at large. Many have been decisively, by overwhelming majorities. And yet there is neither any effort to bring these policies even somewhat into line with public opinion, even center-right public opinion, or move aggressively to take the steps that would make public opinion less immediately relevant. On the contrary, we see the administration taking all these actions that one would expect if Trump had fully consolidated control over the state’s so-called “power ministries” and secured full or fullish control over the state, eliminated real sources of opposition power and so forth. Only he hasn’t. 

You might be saying, well, that’s what you think, Josh. He’s already done X, Y and Z. But it is what I think. And I’m pretty sure I’m right. 

I’m not saying he’s toast or that everything is going to be fine. But he’s far from effectively locking everything down. 

And yet we’re rolling at full speed into what we what we might call North Korean aesthetics of power with triumphal arches that will soon enough be dusty, half-broken relics, renaming everything after the Maximum Leader. It’s all weird. And it is all of this very particular moment. 

In a way, the Susie Wiles drama is part of it. The person at the center of the White House power structure talked openly and disparagingly about the president. And the immediate reaction was for Wiles to issue what can only be called an intentionally absurd denial and for every Cabinet secretary to tweet out a post-struggle session-like emphatic defense of Wiles and pledge of fealty to Trump. 

In fact, by the end of the day Trump said in response to a question about Wiles that he agreed with what she said. This is all deeply weird. But I think it tends to confirm everything I said above, as I noted in the post earlier this week about Wiles. It’s a sign of her power; it is a sign of the government’s weakness and unpopularity. (You don’t say the president is a weirdo who’s done a bunch of terrible things if everyone thinks things are awesome and the present is the future.) 

Finally, it is a sign of an emerging vacuum at the top — at the top of Trump’s body in his head, and at the top of the government in Trump. I’m not saying Trump is sick or dying or declining in cognitive terms. Those things are very possible. He may simply be bored and in need of distractions, which is of a piece with the sense enervation and fragmentation.

Trump just hit a new low: He pardoned a man who killed more Americans than died on 9/11. Just Evil.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZAxZA-fKtQ 

This latest pardon was of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez—a narco-terrorist who was a business associate of the notorious drug dealer El Chapo. 

Hernandez served as President of Honduras from 2014 to 2022--but in reality his real business was flooding the United States with cocaine. As the U.S. Department of Justice put it, Hernandez “was at the center of one of the largest and most violent drug-trafficking conspiracies in the world.”   

Trump knew that by pardoning Hernandez it would destroy his claim that the reason he’s executing people in small boats off the coast of Venezuela was to protect Americans from drugs. This is especially true given the cocaine Hernandez dumped into the U.S. killed tens of thousands of Americans by way of overdoses. Yet Trump doesn’t care because the benefit he receives from pardoning this convicted drug kingpin was worth it. 

Hernandez was no low-level drug dealer. He was the key player in orchestrating a vast drug trafficking conspiracy that raked in millions for cartels while keeping Honduras one of Central America’s poorest, most violent and most corrupt countries. Federal prosecutors were able to prove in his 2024 trial that Hernández--as a congressman and then President of Honduras--partnered with the former leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, Joaquín Guzman Loera aka El Chapo, among other people. 

As evidence at trial detailed, members of the Hernandez drug conspiracy often turned to violence and murder to protect and grow their drug trafficking enterprise--attacking rival traffickers who threatened their grip on the Honduran cocaine trade. As DOJ explained, Hernandez’s co-conspirators “were armed with machine guns and destructive devices, including AK-47s, AR-15s, and grenade launchers, which they used to protect their massive cocaine loads as they transited across Honduras on their way to the United States.” 

In return, Hernandez personally received “millions of dollars of drug money from some of the largest and most violent drug-trafficking organizations in Honduras, Mexico, and elsewhere, and used those bribes to fuel his rise in Honduran politics.” Yes, he worked with the Mexican drug cartels that are responsible for producing fentanyl-- the primary driver of U.S. drug overdose deaths as the DEA has documented. 

This guy was worse than “Scarface” in that he used the full powers of his political offices to benefit himself and his partners in crime. DOJ proved that at trial, explaining that as Hernández rose to power in Honduras, “he provided increased support and protection for his co-conspirators, allowing them to move mountains of cocaine, commit acts of violence and murder, and help turn Honduras into one of the most dangerous countries in the world.” 

Hernandez would corruptly work with the United States to prosecute drug traffickers who threatened his grip on power--while at the same time promising drug traffickers who bribed him that they would remain safe in Honduras. And as prosecutors showed at trial, Hernandez enjoyed unleashing the cocaine on the United States, boasting he would “stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses.” 

Overall, the federal government proved that during his political career, “Hernández abused his powerful positions and authority in Honduras to facilitate the importation of over 400 tons of cocaine into the U.S.” 

Yes, the man Trump just pardoned facilitated the smuggling of 400 tons of cocaine into our nation--which is the equivalent of 800,000 pounds or 363 million grams. Two of his co-defendants plead guilty -- a former Honduran police chief, Juan Carlos Bonilla, and Hernandez’s cousin Mauricio Hernandez. However, Hernandez stood trial in 2024 and was convicted of various felonies including conspiring to import cocaine into the United States and using machine guns and destructive devices in furtherance of the cocaine importation conspiracy. That led to his 45-year prison sentence. 

After his conviction, then U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said, “As President of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández abused his power to support one of the largest and most violent drug trafficking conspiracies in the world, and the people of Honduras and the United States bore the consequences.” 

U.S. Attorney Damian Williams for the Southern District of New York whose office prosecuted Hernández stated that the former President has “helped to facilitate the importation of an almost unfathomable 400 tons of cocaine to this country: billions of individual doses sent to the United States with the protection and support of the former president of Honduras.” 

Simply put, Hernández was a very bad man. He abused his public office to engage in a massive illegal drug ring. Worse, Hernández “flooded” the United States with cocaine. 

Hernández bears responsibility for the cocaine overdoses in the United States during the years he was a major supplier of that drug. In fact, in the time Hernandez served as President from 2014 to 2022, overdose deaths caused by cocaine exploded in the U.S. At the start of Hernández’ term in 2014, the U.S. saw about 5,000 deaths by way of cocaine overdoses—per the CDC. By his last year in office in 2022, cocaine overdoses in our county rocketed up to nearly 28,000 per year. (See CDC chart at link which shows spike in cocaine overdoses that exploded when Hernandez took power in 2014.)

Trump is an unbelievably evil and corrupt piece of shit.