Trump has never let facts stand in his way. From Dan Cohen at uncapturedmedia.com:
While Trump officials claim that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is trafficking fentanyl to the U.S., American law enforcement reports show that the real culprit is its close ally: India
The Trump administration’s campaign of extrajudicial strikes on small boats in the Caribbean, and its broader push toward a confrontation with Venezuela, rests on an extraordinarily weak and deeply cynical justification.
After boasting in October that “every boat kills 25,000 on average,” Trump celebrated a series of strikes that left dozens dead, claiming they were disrupting fentanyl shipments headed to the United States.
This framing obscures a far more serious and uncomfortable reality. The fentanyl crisis is not only the most urgent public-health emergency in the United States; it is a mass-death event that has unfolded so slowly and steadily over decades that it has come to be treated as routine.
Since 1999, drug overdoses—especially from opioids and increasingly from synthetic opioids—have killed more than one million Americans, most of them young or middle aged. On average, 120 to 130 Americans have died from overdoses every day for a quarter century. By life-years lost, the epidemic has already surpassed the American Civil War.
Despite early signals that it might scale back foreign entanglements and normalize relations with Venezuela, the Trump administration has returned to the same bipartisan foreign-policy script that guided its failed 2019 effort to install Juan Guaidó as president. In recent months, it has advanced a narrative accusing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro of overseeing a state-run drug cartel known as the Cartel of the Suns. This narrative has served as the basis for a series of U.S. strikes on small vessels in the Caribbean that the administration claims are engaged in drug trafficking.
