On Saturday afternoon, JD Vance seemed predictably eager to defend Donald Trump’s decision to launch an offensive in Venezuela and capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. In fact, the vice president specifically emphasized the fact that Maduro was formally charged by U.S. prosecutors with drug trafficking.
“You don’t get to avoid justice for drug trafficking in the United States,” Vance wrote via social media, “because you live in a palace in Caracas.”
Perhaps not — although apparently you do get to avoid justice for drug trafficking in the United States if you’re a foreign head of state with ties to members of Trump’s inner circle. As The New York Times summarized:
Two Latin American strongmen were charged in Manhattan with corrupting their governments, using state power to import hundreds of tons of cocaine into the United States.
One, the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, was abruptly pardoned by President Trump last month. The other, President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, was captured on Saturday in a military raid.
The White House and its allies justified the operation to bomb Venezuela and seize Maduro in large part because of the federal drug-trafficking indictment against the South American leader. This isn’t an altogether persuasive pitch, especially given Trump’s emphasis on Venezuela’s oil, but over the weekend it was nevertheless one of the administration’s principal talking points.
It’s not as if the U.S. can just remain indifferent when the head of a Latin American country is accused of drug trafficking, right?
That might be easier to take seriously if Trump hadn’t just pardoned the head of a Latin American country who was convicted of drug trafficking.
Trump, despite all of his “tough on crime” chest-thumping, thought it’d be a good idea to pardon a notorious drug trafficker, who was convicted last year and sentenced to 45 years in prison. Even by 2025 standards, the developments were breathtaking: As a separate New York Times analysis summarized, Hernández “orchestrated a vast trafficking conspiracy” that benefited drug cartels, even as Honduras grew poorer, more violent and more corrupt.
Hernández also boasted that he would “stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses” and accepted a $1 million bribe to allow cocaine shipments to pass through his country, all while trafficking more than 500 tons of cocaine into the U.S.
Trump, however, freed him anyway, thanks in part to his political connections to political operatives such as Roger Stone.
On Nov. 30, Trump tried to defend his pardon, telling reporters, “If somebody sells drugs in that country, that doesn’t mean you arrest the president and put him in jail for the rest of his life.”
Four weeks later, he took a foreign president into custody and took steps to put him behind bars for the rest of his life.








