In a gobsmacking interview released on Tuesday, President Donald Trump was asked about his eyebrow-raising pardon of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández.
He was convicted of running a massive, state-protected cocaine trafficking operation that funneled 400 tons of drugs into the United States while he simultaneously took bribes from cartels and weaponized Honduran security forces to protect the trade.
As the Justice Department said at the time, this was “one of the largest and most violent drug-trafficking conspiracies in the world”—and that wasn’t hyperbole.
That 400 tons amounted to 4.5 billion individual doses of cocaine. Hernández once boasted“We are going to stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses, and they’re never even going to know it.”
Even in the pantheon of questionable Trump moves, this one stands out.
Trump has spent years invoking drug trafficking as justification for tariffs against Canada, China, and Mexico, not to mention his undeclared and illegal naval assaults on Venezuelan fishing boats.
Asked by Politico’s Dasha Burns how this squared with his supposed “zero tolerance on drug trafficking,” Trump’s answer was befuddling.
“Well I don’t know him, and I know very little about him other than people said it was like an Obama-Biden type setup,” he blathered.
What the what?
The presidential pardon is absolute, but it is ideally used to correct miscarriages of justice, show mercy in extraordinary circumstances, or resolve inequities the legal system failed to address. Trump, of course, has used it to reward allies, peddle influenceand likely profit. His pardon pace has been absolutely frantic, one of the few areas of government where he can act without interference and where his authoritarian instincts run free.
Related | Nothing says ‘tough on drugs’ like Trump pardoning a trafficker
According to CNN, Trump pardoned more people in the first 30 days of his latest term than Barack Obama did in eight years as president. And to date, he has pardoned over 1,500 people in 2025 alone, compared to President George W. Bush’s 189, Obama’s 212, and President Joe Biden’s 80 total pardons while in office.
Yet it takes a certain kind of callous incompetence to hand out a pardon and then claim, “I don’t know him” and “I know very little about him.” Someone told him Hernández was “set up” by Obama and Biden? How about maybe you have your staff investigate the matter, talk to prosecutors, read the f’n Wikipedia entry—anything!
That “someone” feeding him that nonsense is none other than dirty trickster Roger Stonethe longtime GOP ratfucker and self-described political hitman who has orbited Republican scandals since the Nixon era. Stone lobbied Trump for months on Hernández’s behalf. Stone doesn’t do anything for free, and he’s not stupid.
But it’s one thing to be manipulated by the people who have mastered working around Trump’s increasingly fragile cognition. It’s another to go on camera and shrug your shoulders and say, “I don’t know nothin’ about it except what my pal Roger told me.”
In a sane world, this would end a presidency. In a sane world, it would be item 47,335 in the long list of things that should have ended his presidency.
But this will simply deepen the anxiety Republicans are already feeling after their disastrous electoral performance last month. They’ve begun challenging Trump on the Venezuelan boat strikeshis attempt to extend ACA subsidiesand the Epstein files. That list will grow as the GOP’s political survival becomes increasingly tied to how far they can crawl away from him.
Trump handing out pardons to notorious drug traffickers? Republicans are not going to line up to defend him on this—especially when the president himself can’t be bothered to justify it.
