As Trump Warns Venezuela, His Drug Trafficker Pardon Exposes Deep Contradictions

Trump’s Hard Line on Venezuela Collides With Pardon of Convicted Drug Trafficker

President Donald Trump’s social media posts within a single day highlighted a stark contradiction in his stated war on drug trafficking. For years, he and his senior advisers have cast drug cartels as a top national security threat and vowed to wipe them out across the Western Hemisphere.

Yet even as he escalated his rhetoric against Venezuela and its alleged role in the narcotics trade, he moved to free one of the most prominent figures ever convicted in a U.S. drug case: former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández.

Threats Against Venezuela’s Airspace

On Saturday, Trump posted that airspace “above and surrounding Venezuela” should be considered “CLOSED IN ITS ENTIRETY,” signaling what he framed as a new, tougher phase in his campaign against drug cartels. The message came amid a major U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean, which the White House has largely justified as a counternarcotics operation.

The administration has repeatedly insisted the goal is to stop the flow of drugs from the Caribbean and South America. Officials have pointed to nearly two dozen U.S. strikes since early September on boats they say were trafficking drugs to the United States, reportedly killing more than 80 people — though detailed evidence has not been made public.

Behind the scenes, Trump has also shown interest in Venezuela’s vast oil reserves, and he and his advisers have made clear they want to see President Nicolás Maduro removed from power.

A Pardon for Juan Orlando Hernández

Just hours before the Venezuela post, Trump used social media to announce that he was granting a full pardon to Hernández, the former Honduran leader convicted in the United States on drug trafficking charges. The pardon has not yet been formally executed, but the announcement stunned officials in both Honduras and Washington.

Prosecutors had presented Hernández as a central figure in a massive cocaine operation, accusing him of accepting “cocaine-fueled bribes” from traffickers and using the machinery of the state — the military, police and courts — to shield their shipments. They said he allowed cocaine, much of it originating in Venezuela, to move through Honduras on its way to the United States.

Hernández was sentenced to 45 years in prison after prosecutors urged the judge to ensure he would die behind bars, citing his abuse of power and the vast damage caused by the drugs. His family has insisted his conviction was politically motivated, but much of the investigation unfolded during Trump’s first term, and one of the lead prosecutors, Emil Bove III, later became one of Trump’s lawyers and a senior Justice Department official before being nominated as an appeals court judge.

In a statement explaining his move, Trump said he acted at the request of “many friends” of Hernández. “They gave him 45 years because he was the president of the country — you could do this to any president on any country,” Trump argued.

Critics Call Out a “Bogus Narrative”

The two announcements — a hard-line escalation against alleged narco-trafficking in Venezuela and clemency for a man convicted of moving hundreds of tons of cocaine — prompted accusations of hypocrisy.

Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia, denounced the pardon as “unconscionable” and said it undermined Trump’s claim to be serious about fighting cartels. “It completely undercuts the administration’s claim that they really care about narco-trafficking, and that raises the question of what is really going on with the Venezuela operation,” he said.

Tommy Vietor, a former National Security Council spokesman under President Barack Obama, contrasted the leniency for Hernández with the lethal strikes on alleged traffickers at sea. “Hernández was convicted of conspiring to traffic 400 tons of cocaine into the United States, and he gets a pardon,” he said. Meanwhile, he argued, “unknown individuals who may or may not be fisherman or drug traffickers — we don’t really know — are getting murdered in the open seas.” He called the policy “nonsensical and blatantly illegal.”

Ricardo Zuniga, a former senior State Department official for the Western Hemisphere, said it was “quite evident” across multiple administrations that Hernández had been involved in criminal activity. He added that even many officials sympathetic to Trump would likely be shocked by the decision.

White House Defends Its Record

Despite the backlash, the White House insists the president has done more than any of his predecessors to fight drug trafficking.

“By securing the border and striking designated narco-terrorists smuggling drugs to kill Americans, the president has undoubtedly done more than anyone to take on the scourge of illicit drug deaths,” spokeswoman Anna Kelly said.

Senior adviser Stephen Miller echoed that message, telling reporters that the administration is determined to shield Americans from transnational organized crime. He described Venezuela’s leadership as a “narcoterrorist ring” that traffics drugs, weapons and people into the United States.

Shortly after Trump’s pardon announcement, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted his own message online: “We have only just begun to kill narco-terrorists.”

A Strategy Marked by Mixed Signals

The Trump administration’s buildup of forces in the Caribbean, combined with its secretive intelligence operations targeting Venezuela and Maduro, has fueled speculation that its objectives go well beyond drug interdiction.

At the same time, the decision to free Hernández — a man U.S. prosecutors had portrayed as a linchpin of the very narco-state Trump claims to be fighting — has raised fresh questions about the coherence and motives of the president’s approach to the drug war.

To critics, the contrast between the tough talk and the pardon is not just a matter of mixed messaging; it’s evidence that the administration’s narrative about combating narcotrafficking is, as Senator Kaine put it, “bogus.”