Today Donald Trump talked tough on fentanyl:
To stop the deadly drugs that are poisoning our people, I will deploy the U.S. Navy to impose a full fentanyl blockade on the waters of our region.…The drug cartels are waging war on America, and we will destroy those cartels!
Let's roll the tape. Here are fentanyl overdose deaths:
Fentanyl deaths doubled during Trump's presidency. It was a genuine crisis. Here's what he did about it:
Pretty much nothing. Seizures of fentanyl by Border Control stayed low and flat through the end of his presidency. It wasn't until Joe Biden had been in office for a year that the numbers finally increased significantly.
As usual, Trump is full of hot air. "We are going to stop the inflow of drugs into New Hampshire and into our country 100%," he said in 2016. But interdictions didn't rise. Funding to reduce the supply of opioids was cut. He promised to designate Mexican drug cartels as terrorists but then backed down. He held a bunch of press conferences and promised a "war" on fentanyl, but in the end he hardly did a thing. What makes anyone believe he'd do anything a second time around?
Kevin raises an interesting question. The press uniformly allows Trump to campaign as an outsider. I’ve never heard a reporter or a media pundit ask Trump why he didn’t do any of these things during his presidency.
You’d think he’d be constantly attacked on that basis and not just by the press but by Democrats also. But that seems to be extremely rare. I really don’t understand why this is so but it does seem very much to be so.
Because the whole point of Trump as a candidate is the outsiderness. Even if he didn't do squat during his first term, in the minds of his fan base he's still the only game in town if you want to break the establishment's hold on Washington. Trump represents the hopes and dreams of millions of people who see no other path to stopping corporate America from destroying the bottom half of the country in their unrelenting march to extract every last dollar out of the middle and working classes.
At best, you’ve explained how Trump’s disciples see him and the world. But that doesn’t explain why the media and most Democrats give Trump a pass on him promising to do in the future what he utterly failed to do in the past when he was the president. In my mind, giving Trump a pass on this is simply inexplicable for the media and inexcusable for Democrats.
As to the media, I think it's mere self-interest. They don't want to piss off a large fraction of their actual or potential audience, especially ones who are highly prone to being pissed off and walking away if they don't like what they see/hear. Plus there's the "access" thing and the "brand" thing for individual "journalists." There's simply nothing to be gained, and a LOT to be lost, by saying plainly what a liar Trump is, and therefore by CLEAR implication what a bunch of chumps his cult were and are.
As to Dems, I agree: this is their JOB. I can only hope that they're holding their fire until things heat up a little more, to keep from being tuned out by both the media and the voters, and just generally not to peak too soon. Trump's vulnerabilities aren't going away -- he manifests them publicly almost every day -- and his cult aren't going to waver, so there's still a lot of time to put pressure where it can have some effect. I hope.
bbleh gets it right.
Everything being terrible gets eyeballs from the right and left.
[Many] liberals would rather be upset and angry than actually make a difference.
Effect. An Enlightenment happened and in some towns there are structures that exist for reasons that can't be explained except by faith on almost every corner. And I'm not talking about banks.
There will be no effect, only reinforcement, a re-entrenching, possibly violence when reality comes crashing down upon their church.
I have NO hope.
The media are covering the real story. Trump is an outsider, he's a piece of garbage, but still an outsider. The media people with friends and families too who aren't blind to the fact that the something is very, very wrong with the policy levers in the US.
The Dems are running from their own track record of turfing Bernie Sanders out and they've got no one on the bench who has that outsider cred. Just more of the same.
Large swaths of the country are tired of more of the same. They are tired of Private Equity buying everything that's not nailed down, they're tired of price increases for everything, and they're tired of it being made so obvious that the monopoly board is rigged against them. If you all don't see the revolution coming, I don't know what to say.
The media avoids covering policy, any policy, like the plague. That would require work. Horse race coverage just requires transcribing poll results into English, and personality coverage just requires printing campaign press releases.
For what its worth, I suspect many segments of the media would love to cover policy. The problem is most people aren't interested in reading it.
The Dem’s have failed to capitalize on this because they never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity! So many would rather march meekly into a re-education camp while muttering about taking the high road and feeling morally superior than get into the gutter and fight. Michelle Obama has a lot to answer for with that “When they go low, we go high” baloney. This is a life and death struggle for our democracy, if we fail to commit everything, then we lose everything.
Kudos to Kevin for writing more about an actual policy of one of the candidates than the WaPo and NYT have done in the last 4 months. We are getting close to the first primaries and even after 3 debates voters haven't got the vaguest idea what any of these people would do if elected. We only know what Trump would do because of his track record and his social media accounts. If you were relying on the NYT, you would be completely in the dark.
I presume he is going to pay for this full blockade with more tax cuts?
I’m guessing that he’ll say that Mexico will pay for the blockade just like they’re going to pay for his wall.
Since you could probably bring a year's supply of fentanyl over in a small yacht, not sure what the Navy is going to do.
It all arrives by various legal mail and other freight service anyway. Really what he's saying is, he will deploy our Mighty Armed Forces against Eeevil (nonwhite) Foreigners who bring Bad Things to our sacred shores. Could be drugs, could be immigrants, could be any number of things, but for sure it's Bad (nonwhite) Foreigners who would be defeated by our Mighty Armed Forces, if only they were led by someone with the Leadership to lead them.
This gets at what strikes me most about trump's bloviating here-- the image is that fentanyl is snuck into the country by some nefarious sneaky small-timers in their tiny sneaky small watercraft, or snuck into the country by furtive sneaking individuals who skulk around the desert by night, both at the behest of shadowy foreign cartels.
As you say, it comes in parcels and containers that move through the major facilities and get processed by them. It won't be stopped by the Navy or Coast Guard blowing sneaky little vessels out of the water. That's just crap out of bad 90s TV shows.
So you are saying @ColBatGuano (if that in fact IS your name) that Trump is promising something that is impossible? Can he do that? He has not done that before, has he?
The Navy can't do anything, it's the preview of the Coast Guard. Unless the man wants war, of course.
The reason there were fewer seizures was that the cartels knew Trump would forcefully take action against them and thus stopped trying to send them. The reason there was so many deaths was drugs already here under the failed Obama administration were still being used.
Ta da!
You missed:
"Strong"
"X said: Sir, you are the best president ever."
This is his way of trying to cover up his "they're poisoning our blood" gaffe, by doubling down with a ludicrous idea.
you only have 3 years marked as the trump administration
Actually, that is only two.
This is true! And it makes KD's case much stronger, because it dramatizes that the very rapid growth of OD deaths over trump's last two years fell off significantly in Biden's first year. Good eye.
In fact, 2019 and 2020 were the two worst years for increasing fentanyl ODs. That was on trump's watch only, his and his alone.
What a gasbag he is.
We had a perfectly safe drug in OxyContin and everyone got mad about it because, of course, some users over did it. Now they love fentanyl and the rate of overdose is even worse! Hilarious.
Not sure...
[Fry eye]
The world wonders, are you being snarky or are you an idiot?
Why doesn't the seizures chart go back further than the start of 2019?
Trump is a salesman, not a doer. With Trump it's all talk, any action is at best incidental or some poorly planned initiative run by his minions. As George Conway pointed out he lives alone within his own head without any moral compass or empathy. Talk is all he knows and all he cares about.
One of the most exhausting things about trump is that he always uses talk as an offensive weapon, every time he opens his mouth, and even in moments when normal people don't have ulterior motives.
There is never a moment when he isn't standing opposite you trying to get you to submit to him in some way. There is never a moment when he stands alongside you-- even when he says what his followers want to hear from him, he's not doing it out of solidarity with them, but to gain mastery over them. He's good at that so it's easy for them to mistake it for empathy.
But he wants the same mastery over his own followers that he and they want over everybody else. For him there's ultimately no difference between a follower and an enemy. The force of words and presence must make them all submit.
Do not forget that when the border is “secured” it is in both directions. The next step will be exit visas and currency restrictions for those wishing to leave. But that sort of thing could never happen here, could it? Perhaps Stephen Miller has some thoughts on the subject…….
Seizures is perhaps not the right measure. It could be that the volume of seizures went up because the attempts (and amounts) to smuggle went up, while the rate of interdiction remained constant.