Trump Is Not a Nationalist. He's Something Worse.
This week, Honduras inaugurated a new president, Nasry Asfura, a construction magnate backed by seemingly strange bedfellows: members of the notorious MS-13 gang and President Trump. Mr. Trump had urged Hondurans to vote for Mr. Asfura days before MS-13 gang members posing as election observers threatened to kill anyone who didn’t vote for that candidate. Amid weeks of election uncertainty and protests, Mr. Trump warned Hondurans of “hell to pay” if they chose a different outcome. Mr. Asfura’s victory marks the success of Mr. Trump’s campaign to resuscitate a political party tainted by its widely known ties to cartels.
The story of how Mr. Trump came to intervene in Honduran politics and align himself with a foreign terrorist organization is essential for understanding the world he is trying to build. He has been meddling in multiple elections in Latin America, and recently captured Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, in a military operation to have him face federal drug trafficking charges. He’s now threatening to arrest the president of Colombia on suspicion of drug trafficking and to bomb cartels in Mexico. His actions may seem contradictory. But there is a coherent logic to them: They expand territorial power for a class of transnational elites who believe they’re above the law.
Last month, Mr. Trump pardoned one of the country’s best-known convicted drug traffickers: Juan Orlando Hernández. Mr. Hernández was the president of Honduras from 2014 to 2022; in that time, there was a steep surge in migration from that country to the United States as families fled his narco-state. In 2024, he was sentenced to 45 years in prison for his role in what the U.S. Department of Justice called “one of the largest and most violent drug trafficking conspiracies in the world.” He was convicted of conspiring to distribute hundreds of tons of cocaine, reportedly boasting of plans to “stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses.” In explaining his pardon, Mr. Trump relied on a conspiracy theory circulating in conservative circles: that Mr. Hernández was a political prisoner of former President Joe Biden’s. It was, in Mr. Trump’s words, a “witch hunt.”
But Mr. Trump’s real motivations are hidden in plain sight. Not long after his second inauguration, the Claremont Institute, an influential conservative think tank in California, published a call for him to pardon Mr. Hernández. So did Mr. Trump’s longtime friend and fellow felon Roger Stone in a blog post, written with Shane Trejo. Both argued that the pardon would hurt President Xiomara Castro, a democratically elected progressive and the first woman to be president of Honduras. They wrote that it would re-empower the right-wing party, presumably by rehabilitating it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/29/opinion/prospera-honduras-trump-pardon.html?
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This is about building a global elite that are immune to all laws and controls.
Chilling.
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