In a federal courtroom in New York City last year, a crime boss from the most notorious drug cartel in Honduras took the stand to testify against Juan Orlando Hernández, the country’s former President. “They should have tried to catch us,” he said, of the Honduran government, which Hernández led from 2014 to 2022. Instead, “they allied with us.” The former President was found to be responsible for more than four hundred tons of cocaine reaching the United States. The Justice Department had been building the case against many of his family members and associates for years, most notably during Donald Trump’s first term.

On November 28th, two days before national elections in Honduras, President Trump announced that he was pardoning Hernández, who was just a year into a forty-five-year sentence he was serving in a federal prison in West Virginia. “It was a Biden setup,” Trump said. “I looked at the facts.” Though the White House denied it, such facts had apparently come via the political operative Roger Stone, who’d handed the President a letter from Hernández in which the former President called Trump “Your Excellency” and compared his plight to Trump’s own “persecution.” The two men’s shared resentment of Joe Biden evidently proved more important than Hernández’s rap sheet. Trump didn’t seem troubled by the fact that combatting the flow of drugs into the U.S. is his Administration’s principal rationale for launching a string of boat attacks in the Caribbean. Those attacks, in which the U.S. military, without evidence, has targeted alleged drug traffickers and killed at least eighty-seven people to date, appear to violate national and international law.

The same day that Trump announced the pardon, the Washington Post published a story saying that the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, had reportedly given a verbal order to kill two survivors of a September strike in the Caribbean. It is a war crime to kill anyone who has surrendered or is incapacitated. Hegseth, who had watched the operation from a remote location, immediately deflected responsibility to Admiral Frank M. Bradley, the commanding officer in charge of the operation. “I did not personally see survivors,” Hegseth said. “This is called the fog of war.”

On Thursday, Bradley briefed members of Congress in a closed-door session at the Capitol, where he denied that there had been an order to kill survivors and justified the second strike on the ground that undestroyed cocaine on the boat posed a “risk.” Predictably, the vast majority of Republicans were ready to move on, but lawmakers who saw the footage described the two survivors clinging to part of the boat. “How is that legitimate,” Senator Chris Coons, of Delaware, asked of the strikes, “if President Trump can pardon a convicted narcoterrorist trafficker?” By that evening, Hegseth was facing another scandal: the inspector general at the Department of Defense had just released to Congress its report that he had “created a risk to operational security” by sharing classified details of an attack in Yemen in a group chat on his phone. “Total exoneration,” Hegseth wrote on X.

Hegseth’s conduct is a case study in how the Administration’s growing sense of heedlessness and unaccountability is shaping disastrous policy. Because the President had labelled several drug cartels “terrorist organizations” in a series of executive orders, the government simply asserted that suspected traffickers were “unlawful combatants” who could be summarily killed. Trump, citing drug-overdose deaths in the U.S., claimed that the boat attacks were a form of national self-defense. But the drug overwhelmingly responsible for such deaths in the U.S. is fentanyl, which doesn’t come from South America.

The idea that these attacks are about stopping drugs was never credible; they instead reflect the President’s increasing fixation on Venezuela and the belief inside the Administration that its authoritarian leader, Nicolás Maduro, needs to be removed from office. Few outside Maduro’s circle of loyalists and abettors deny that he is a repressive, corrupt leader who’s collapsed the economy and brutally punished critics. Last summer, he declared victory in an election that he appears to have lost badly. How to deal with Maduro’s regime is a legitimately pressing question. But wrapped up in the case for his ouster are all of Trump’s most dangerous proclivities, including his anti-immigrant sentiments and his disregard for laws constraining his power.

At the start of his second term, Trump declared a Venezuelan prison gang called Tren de Aragua a foreign terrorist organization and falsely claimed that the Maduro government was directing it to use migrants to invade the U.S. This became the basis, in March, for invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a law previously used on just three occasions in American history, and only during times of war. According to a source with close ties to the Administration, Venezuela became a natural target: Maduro was an international pariah, and his ability to strike back seemed relatively limited.

Trump has now ordered the largest military buildup in the region since the Cuban missile crisis. Yet key questions remain flagrantly unaddressed: What will happen if Maduro refuses to leave office? In the event that he does leave, how will the U.S. prevent a power vacuum that would lead to further violence and instability? The Venezuelan regime could well survive Maduro’s absence, with his second-in-command, Diosdado Cabello, or any number of other senior figures poised to succeed him. The Trump Administration’s logic has seemed to depend on the notion that the Venezuelan opposition, now led by this year’s Nobel Peace Prize laureate, María Corina Machado, would take over the government in an interim capacity. Experts, however, caution that this would be exceedingly complicated. Machado is opposed by the military officers whose support she would need for her or a close ally to assume power. Machado has championed Trump, in anticipation of his help in dislodging Maduro, but if the regime can reëntrench itself this endorsement would damage her reputation and set back her cause.

Much, as usual, will hinge on the unpredictable impulses of the President. When Maduro’s advisers offered to cut a deal with the U.S., in October, Trump called off diplomatic talks. Weeks later, after rumors of an assassination plot against Maduro, the two men spoke by phone. An invasion would be catastrophic, but the current course of brinkmanship isn’t sustainable. Trump is in a bind but doesn’t seem to know it, or care. Hours after Thursday’s briefing about a potential war crime, the Pentagon announced that it had killed four more people in another strike, this time in the Pacific. ♦