Agenda 47: Trump's Plan To Invade Mexico

to the episodes put together one of my colleagues. Today, I'm going to be talking about Trump's border policy, particularly has promised to declare war on the cartels and use the United States military to attack them. Before we get into it, I do want to note, if you notice this sounds a little bit different. I am in Texas currently. My father has leukemia. He's being treated for on chemo in the hospital. Just finished came out actually, but anyway, I had to fly down to Texas last minute, and

I'm not recording this in my normal space. We should be back to normal, you know, very soon here. But I just wanted to explain if if you think it sounds different. It's not me fucking something up. I just had to fly across the country. So let's talk about Agenda forty seven and the cartels. Back in two thousand and eight, when I was still a baby and in fact in Dallas, Texas, as i am right now, I worked as the secretary for a financial planner named Al Jones.

I was bad at this job, and I didn't really know much about financial planning then, but I have since come to suspect that Al was not great at his job either. The first sign at this might have been the fact that when I took the job, Al got excited because I mentioned during our little interview that I wanted to be a writer someday and he was like, I'm a novelist, and I was like, or a financial planner. And then he hands me a copy of his self

published novel Operation night Watch. Now, the plot to this motherfucker was barkingly mad. Spurred on by an epidemic of inner city violence. The government sent in a team of special Forces guys to take on the criminals. I think it's the government who sends them. They may just be a bunch like Green Berets and Navy seals who decide to fight crime on their own. It's been a while

since I read the thing. I'm trying to have a hardcover delivered to me, but there's not a lot of them left, so you may get to hear more from this book. But anyway, the idea of this is that, like, yeah, there's all of these very much racially coded criminals in the streets making life too dangerous for regular people, these evil drug dealers and robbers, and we just need our

special forces guys to murder them, right. There was a lot of uncomfortable fetishization of brutal violence from this very mild mannered seeming dude who mostly held meetings at Texas roadhouses with old people to try to get them to invest in annuities or whatever a split annuity is. I've since forgotten so again, obviously, even at that point in time, mostly having lived either in the country the suburbs, I had spent enough time in Dallas to know that his

description of inner city life was not precisely accurate. But what I remember most about the book is that it wasn't even really a story. It was and talking to Al made this clear. A literal description of the policy he wanted to see. The thin characters that he included in the story were basically just there to help dress up what was again a policy proposal, and that policy was, we should use the US military to kill quote unquote

drug dealers. Right now, over the last fifteen years or so, mainstream Republican policy has actually caught up to my old boss, and now President Trump has included in Agenda forty seven a promise to invade Mexico with US special forces. That's not the extent of the promise. We will be talking about that all through this fun episode. On Deceiver twenty second, twenty twenty three, the Trump campaign uploaded a page titled President Donald J. Trump declares War on Cartels to his

campaign website. And I don't know about you, guys, I'm pretty sick in the motherfucker's voice, So I'm just gonna read how this opens. But if you go to the website, you can listen to him say this if that makes you happier. The drug cartels are waging war on America, and it's now time for America to wage war on the cartels. In this war, Joe Biden has cited against the United States and with the cartels. They're making more money than they've ever made before. Times ten. There's never

been anything like it. They're major, major companies. They're bigger than even some of our biggest companies. Biden's open border policies are a deadly betrayal of our nation. He's definitely got a unique diction. Yet you know, Trump came up with that one more or less on his own. Didn't need to be scripted.

with Trump. He claims that under his presidency we had a quote very very strong border and in fact, the strongest border in the history of the country, and quote drugs were at a low for forty five years. Now, it's important to fact check things that both Joe Biden and Donald Trump say the use the diction he uses

here does make fact checking slightly difficult. The strongest border kind of a meaningless term, right, But the claim about drugs being at a low for forty five years can be fact checked to some degree, although again his approach to grammar makes it hard to tell what he's claiming here. Right, is drugs at a low for forty five years? Mean, like drug use is at a low, drug smuggling is

at a low? I don't know. He has made variations of this claim often, though, including a note on his campaign website in January twenty twenty three that under his presidency, quote, drug overdose deaths decline nationwide for the first time in

nearly thirty years. So let's assume that that's kind of what he meant to claim, that drug overdose deaths were the lowest they've been for forty five for forty five years, right, which is again, I mean, it's just wrong on its face because earlier he said for thirty years, So like, which is it? Donald? But whatever, Let's say that what he meant to claim is that under his presidency, drug overdose deaths were at the lowest point in a long time. Right,

If we're being fair. That's the fairest I could be to him. And it is true that the overdose death rate dropped during Trump's presidency for one year eighteen. That's the only year that it dropped. During each of the other three years he was in office, the overdose rate rose, and in fact, it rose by record numbers in twenty twenty.

PolitiFact also notes quote looking at overdose deaths from synthetic opioids, the closely watched category that accounts for the largest share of all opioid overdose deaths, the rate rose every year

of Trump's presidency. This is worth noting because all of the things he wants to do at the border to the cartels, all of his justifications for really needing to crack down on human trafficking, for wanting to use the Navy seals or whatever to kill cartel guys to basically invade Mexico, it's to stop fentonl which he describes as

an existential threat to the country. And you know, makes the claim that basically when I was president, you know, all that stuff was where we were taking care of it, it was all all declining, and then when Biden took over, it got a lot worse, No, the rate of finnyl use, wrote in Finyl related deaths in particular rose every single year of Trump's presidency, every single year anyway, Trump promises no mercy to the cartels and that he will designate

the major Ones foreign terrorist organizations with the goal of cutting off their access to global financial systems. Incidentally, this would provide a pretext to basically charging every drug user, whether or not their drugs had anything to do with a cartel, with material support of a terrorist organization, and thus allow night marrish penalties for people caught dealing weed or LSD or whatever, on the justification that they're aiding

the cartels with whom we are at war. Trump also states that he will ask Congress to pass legislation to allow the death penalty for quote drug smugglers and human traffickers. Now, He's made similar statements around drug dealers in the past. Here's how this particular rant on the Agenda forty seven website ends. The drug cartels and their allies and the Biden administration have the blood of countless millions on their hands. Millions and millions of families and people are being destroyed.

When I am back in the White House, the drug king and vicious traffickers will never sleep soundly again. We did it once, and we did it better than anyone else. There's never been a better border than we had just two years ago. It was strong, it was powerful, and it was respected all over the world. And now we're laughed at all over the world. And we're not going to let that happen much longer. We have to take over. We have to be tough, and we have to be smart,

we have to be fair. But if we don't do something immediately, our country is gone. Now that's all ridiculous, but it behooves us to look into the origins of this particular violent fantasy. When President Trump was still in office, he repeatedly floated variations of a single idea using US missiles to destroy so called drug factories, specifically those producing either fentanyl or methamphetamine. Obviously, cartels do operate sizable facilities

and where they prepare drugs for smuggling and sale. They have places where they cut fentanyl, which generally comes from elsewhere, into other drugs, or make it into pills, etc. And they've got places where meth is cooked. Obviously, so as best as the New York Times has been able to trace. His obsession with military action against Mexico seems to have started in late twenty nineteen. So while the coronavirus is spreading, our president, rather than focusing on a response, it's kind

of obsessed with the fentanyl crisis, which is serious. But his way of dealing with it was to hold these constant, large oval office meetings that people absolutely had to attend. Quote some part tennsis from the New York Times. Some participants felt the meetings were of little use because officials tended to perform for mister Trump, and he would perform

for them. And that does put the fun idea in my head of Donald Trump and a bunch of friends all dancing about like, I don't know whatever kind of animal you would train to dance. I'm spacing on that right now. So why don't we just roll to ads for a second. Well, I think of animals. We're back

to continue that quote from the New York Times. When the idea of military intervention was brought up at one such meeting, mister Trump turned to Brett Geroor, who was there in his role as the US Assistant Secretary for Health. Mister Gerrore was also a four star admiral in the Commission Corps of the US Public Health Service, and he was wearing his dress uniform. His main point was that the United States was unable to combat the crisis with

treatment alone. According to a person briefed on his comments, it was clear from the way mister Trump singled out mister Gerror that he had mistakenly thought he was in the military because of his dress uniform. According to two participants in the meeting, mister Geror, in his response, suggested putting lead to target. The two participants recalled that seems likely. Gerroor denies this right. He claims, well, the President knows me really well. We met all the time. He would

never mistake me for a soldier. And like, sure, buddy. For one thing, I totally believe he could meet with Trump regularly and Trump not remember him. But also, it kind of sounds assume I mean again, and these are all maybe not the best sources, but assume the people who are like he said we should put lead to target are telling the truth. That sounds to me like this guy wearing his uniform because he knows it'll impress.

Trump was also trying to use military metaphors because he I think maybe was just trying to have this impact on Trump, right, make Trump think of him as like

a military official giving advice. There's some claims that people in the administration were so concerned about this and were so terrified that like Trump might actually attack Mexico that they asked Jeror to stop wearing his uniform to meetings, basically being like, he's hypnotized by this shit man, Like if you dress like a soldier, he'll take you seriously

when you say this crazy bullshit. Anyway, at the same time this is all going on, Attorney General William Barr had also started floating the idea to the President that maybe the United States should consider carrying out some attacks in Mexico to kill cartel guys to stop the fentanyl.

them right now. The current president of Mexico is is more on the left, and he has a policy described as hugs not bullets, right, which is not using the stick to fight the drug cartels. But that doesn't mean that hasn't been tried. The Mexican government and the Mexican military have carried out a number of very high intensity operations against cartels over the years. It's just like, it's hard.

The cartel problem is a massive, massive, complicated thing, and the idea that like, if we threaten Mexico, they'll finally do it kind of understates the degree to which Mexico is capable of ending this epidemic or ending this problem right of somehow taking back this territory and rendering the cartels unable to function. I don't actually know that they are, you know, I don't know that. I certainly wouldn't say that the current president's plan is working. But no one

else has stopped them either, so I don't know. I think Barr is rather silly when he thinks that it's just a matter of threatening Mexico with an invasion that'll force him to take care of this shit. I don't really know that they have the ability to do that either way. So for his part, Barr does not seem to have actually wanted at military action in Mexico. Again,

he's thinking that the threat will do the trick. And in fact, when Trump pushed back that like, well, maybe we could just shoot some missiles into Mexico, Barr pushed back on this and was like, well, if we fire, missiles will hit, we might hit the wrong target, right, Basically, civilian casualties you know, could happen, so we should avoid that. And that really kind of showcases how fucking dangerous someone like Barr is because his plan is he's thinking he's

playing forty chess or whatever. It's like, yeah, you know, the Mexican government will get scared and they'll take care of these cartels for us. But when you start floating that adu to a guy named Trump, he's gonna be like, well, yeah,

let's just shoot him with missiles. And you may you may push back against that initially, but when your stupid plan to bully Mexico into destroying the cartel's doesn't work because they can't or because they don't want to be bullied, then what where are you, right, you can't step down at that point. You can't back off once you've threatened to bomb them, right, because if you threaten to attack and they don't do shit and then you just kind of like back off, you're gonna look weak. And that's

the worst thing in the world to these people. Right. Trump's certainly not going to accept something like that. It's part of why, like what bar was doing here is just like incredibly irresponsible. Just with a guy like Trump,

you can't pull that shit. So this means again that at some point, if this kind of process goes on, if Trump wins office, if he's to carry out something like what Bar was suggesting or something like what yourr was suggesting, at some point, Trump's kind of need to use military assets to strike Mexico if only save face. And again, the safest thing for him to use would be missiles to basically fire missiles, you know, guided missiles

at factories or whatever making drugs. This avoids risking US servicemen, It certainly avoids the risk of them getting captured. Anyway. I'm gonna quote from the New York Times against here, at least twice during twenty twenty, mister Trump privately asked as Defense Secretary mister Esper about the possibility of sending patriot missiles into Mexico to destroy the drug labs and whether they could blame another country for it. Patriot missiles

are not the kind that would be used. They are surface to air weapons, but mister Trump had had a habit of colleg all missiles patriot missiles. According to two former senior administration officials, I just find that fuddy, like, man, you are the you're the commander in chief, and you don't know, like you don't even know that. Like it's I don't expect the President to say, like I want you to fire this exact version of missile. You know, that's maybe a little more granular than is necessary for

him to know. But like you should know that patriot missiles don't get fired at ground targets. That's not what they do. They're kind of a major part of like our military or min anti missile defense. It's just it's just very silly of him. All this nonsense came to a head for the first time in twenty twenty when, during one of these interminable fentanyl meetings, Trump looked over to Defense Secretary Mark Esper and asked, can we blow up these drug labs with a missile and make it

look like another country did it? Now? That's you know, bad? Right? Like? It brings up a lot of questions, namely like what other country is in a position to fire missiles into Mexico? Right Like, if you're saying, oh, it wasn't US, are you say it's Canada because they'd have to kind of cross a lot of space to do that. He's saying Guatemalas firing missiles into Mexico because it doesn't really seem like a Guatemala move. You know, who are you going

to blame? Thankfully? Esper was one of those rare Trump appointees who possessed a basic minimal capacity for rational thought, and we never, thankfully got the answer to the question what would have had happened if he'd fired a missile into Mexico. Esper argued against the idea, and then he wrote about it in his memoir, which I have an issue with. He's one of these guys who, yeah, maybe we should have noted about that when it happened, rather

than waiting for your fucking book. But people got to get paid, I guess reactions from Mexico to these revelations about Trump considering missiling them and now the fact that he's got on his website like our plan is to use military assets to attack the cartels. Reactions from Mexico have been pretty universally negative for reasons I probably don't

need to elaborate on. President Lopez Obrador told reporters in March, quote, this initiative of the Republicans, besides being irresponsible, is an offense to the people of Mexico, a lack of respect to our independence, to our sovereignty. If they do not change their attitude and think they are going to use Mexico for their propaganda, their electoral and political purposes, we are going to call for not voting for this party because it is interventionalist and human, hypocritical and corrupt. I

don't know he's wrong there. I don't know how much ability the president of Mexico has to shift votes in the United States. But you know, it is interesting. You don't often hear a world leader, specific particularly not of the US's largest trading partners, say that they're going to take sides in an election, not that openly at least, but you know who never takes sides except for your side, because they're always on your side. The products and services

that support this podcast and or program, we're back. So the opposition candidate in next year's Mexican presidential elections also made a statement that was it was a little bit more moderated than obradors, but it belittled Trump's comments about using military force on Mexico and stated, rather than threats, we should work in a smart way. So nobody's really happy with this down in Mexico. Not surprising to see why. Meanwhile, in US politics, conservatives are now falling over themselves to

justify military intervention in Mexico. As soon as Trump adopts this, it now becomes basically the standard Republican line that we need to be sending our special forces guys in to

fight the fucking cartels. I'm not going to go over a laundry list of all the dumbfucks who have embraced this crap idea, but I do want to read one quote from an ABC News article quote House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, Republican Kentucky, on Tuesdays said that it was a mistake that then President Donald Trump did not bomb meth labs in Mexico after he had reportedly asked

his defense secretary about the possibility. In twenty twenty, One of the things we learned post Trump presidency is that he had ordered a bombing of a couple fentanyl labs crystal meth labs in Mexico just across the border, and for whatever reason, the military didn't do it. Comer said on Fox and Friends, I think that was a mistake. Now I want to discuss for a second how impossible

it is for this plan to work. Noted earlier, there are drug labs in Mexico, quite a few of them, making a variety and not just making but in many cases taking drugs that come from elsewhere and basically packaging them in a way that they can be sold or smuggled. That is, those facilities certainly exist, but they are not like the large centralized factories that I don't know, like

a military rival would used to produce tanks. Right, most of this work, even if it is currently being done in a sizable facility, can be done in smaller facilities and can be moved pretty readily. And again, it's just not very intelligent to think that you can cripple this the same way you can cripple an enemy's ability to produce missiles or tanks. And even then that's not easy.

We're actually really bad at it. We've repeatedly during wars bombed countries to attempt to destroy their ability to produce munitions and failed to really do that to a substantial extent. And so something like the narcotics industry, which is even more underground, even more hard to identify by nature of what it is, it's it's a big ask on the surface. Right.

It's also worth laying out why it's dumb as hell to conflate drug cartels with ISIS, because a big part of why Trump, how Trump thinks things are going to go, is like, well, Isis took over Raka, took over Mosel, and then we beat them up, you know, we kick the crap out of them, We destroyed ISIS. That's what he I think, that's literally what he thinks happens, and it's certainly what he wants his voters to think happened.

But that's not really what happened. Right when the physical caliphate was liberated, ISIS went underground, and they are still there and still have the potential to take in whold territory again. ISIS attacks in both Iraq and Syria have been raising steadily for years. There's a lot of reasons for this. Big part of why things have gotten worse in Syria is that the Biden administration has done fuck all to stop the Turkish government from attacking the autonomous

region Rojava. Who are the folks who defeated ISIS in Syria, and that has degraded their capacity to keep a fucking little things. So number one, this victory he claims, wasn't a total victory. And number two, the reason why ISIS was knocked out of you know, Mosl and knocked out of most of their territorial claims in a fairly short period of time was because of a couple of things. Number One, the US was providing support, but we were not carrying out either operation on our own in both

Iraq and Syria. We were supporting other extant militant groups that had a long history and a decent amount of support in the region, right And number two, and maybe you could make the claim that that's the case with the Mexican army, But the other aspect is that ISIS were not guys who had been in charge for forever in that region and had deep bases. Most of them were foreigners, and they were foreigners who had very quickly taken urban areas and then started running them like dog shit. Cartels

have existed for a lot longer. They have effectively and do effectively rule large chunks of Mexico and have done so for longer than ISIS has existed. They have deep networks of local ties and in many areas, a reputation for providing services better than the Mexican government has done.

I don't say this to whitewash how horrible these organizations are, but they are not ISIS, which just came up seemingly out of nowhere, took over a bunch of cities and then got fucking kicked out, and you know, never had a huge base of support among the populace, particularly in Iraq, because again there were just some assholes who showed up one day as opposed to the cartels, which you know, especially once the US starts bombing Mexico and killing Mexican civilians,

which will happen anytime we're bombing them, just the idea, the amount of support it could potentially build for the fucking cartels is substantial. But even beyond that, the idea that you could knock these beat people out easily, they're not. Again, they have a deep base of support, a deep history in these areas. They have functioned for a long time, not just running things, but also constantly fighting against a military and the government that has a degree of capacity

and technology at its back. So the idea that like, you're just going to be able to kick these guys out of whatever, Sonora, the way that you know isis was quote unquote kicked out of mosl It's fanciful, right, It's it's it's a farce. Now, speaking of farces, I want to talk about kind of the the thing that we should all see as the model for what might actually how it would actually work if Trump tried to go into Mexico to take out the cartels. And this

brings me back to Afghanistan. Right during Trump's administration, the Department of Defense was empowered by the president to use vastly more force and their attempts to destroy Taliban drug labs. Obviously, Taliban funded a lot of their war effort with the sale of opium, you know, heroin, whatever, and it was, you know, believed that if we can cut, if we can destroy their ability to grow and process this stuff, we can cut the lake out from underneath the Taliban.

And Trump really bought into this and allowed the DoD to accelerate their efforts to do this. Our forces started carrying out a mix of air strikes and special operations attacks on Taliban drug labs in twenty seventeen. It is the same plan that they executed that Trump is pushing for the United States to use in Mexico and in Afghanistan.

This plan was such an abysmal failure that not only did it not stop drug production, it actually accelerated the production of opiates in fucking Afghanistan at the highest level in recorded history. This program failed so badly that the Pentagon ended their strikes on drug labs in twenty nineteen. They gave up in two years because they didn't couldn't

do it. They were bad at it. Now, the fact that this kind of plan that Trump is pushed would undeniably fail to actually destroy the cartels to stop drugs and human trafficking across the border, this does not mean that it would actually be a failure. For the reasons that Trump and many of the Republicans wanted to fail, which is that declaring war on cartels allows them to justify a major power grap and destroy or in the

lives of US citizens they already see as enemies. And I don't mean to say that this is more serious than the lives that will be lost in Mexico. It certainly not. But this is very serious as well. Last October, a think tank, the Center for Renewing America, published a policy paper with the fun title It's Time to Wage

War on Transnational Drug Cartels. Paper makes it clear that illegal immigration is just as much a priority as fentanel in carrying out these actions, and in fact, it lists the goals of this planned military policy in Mexico this way. Number one, ending the illegal flow of people trafficking victims and drugs across the southern border. Now, the paper suggests creating a new classification that is similar but different to

foreign terrorist organization for the cartels. It lists a series of escalatory stages that Trump's administration should take, starting with putting pressure on the Mexican government to take care of things themselves, and since the Mexican government is not really capable at president of ending a present of ending either

migration or drug cartels. Escalation is inevitable. So after this phase fails, phase two is to have the President start deploying military units, initially to interdict the coast, but also to coordinate with the DEA to target and kill cartel figures and destroy their assets. US ports will be closed whenever the number of illegal immigrant apprehensions that the border increases past a certain level. Right, So they are also saying,

and again you get the feeling from this paper. While Trump always harps on the drugs and the horror is a fentanyl, it's very clear from this paper there is concerned and if not more concerned about the fact that non white people are entering the country quote well costly to the economy. This closing sorts would incentivize the Mexican government to crack down on human smugglers, migrant caravans, and

cartel trafficking networks. Now into the fourth and final phase of this plan, the US government would basically carry out a full scale invasion of parts of Mexico in order to defeat cartels and secure the border. At no point are there any suggestions made as to how this might be done, or why it would be more successful than the attempts that failed in Afghanistan. Instead, they just move right onto the last phase, the victory phase, which includes

these suggestions. Congress should enact legislation that creates enhanced penalties for US citizens found guilty of collaborating with the cartels. Punishment should include mandatory minimum federal sentencing of fifteen years in prison for working with cartels labeled as transnational criminal organizations, and mandatory minimum sentencing of twenty five years in prison for working with cartels labeled under the new Cartel statutory guidelines.

Congress should enact legislation that defines material and financial supports for the cartels designated under the new statutory framework has tantamount to engaging in terrorism against the United States. This basically means, depending on how this is written, it could mean that doing drugs, possessing drugs, having friends who sell or use drugs could mean that you're committing terrorism by

supporting the cartels. It is not impossible that that is how this law these laws should they be actually put on the books. Ever, should this program be enacted, That's not impossible that that's how it would be interpreted and why wouldn't they want to write this would allow them to lock up a shitload of people that they see as being on the left. If you think back to

Richard Nixon. A big reason why, and this is a stated reason why, you know, the war on marijuana was escalated, is that it lets you arrest the fucking hippies and anti war protesters and put them in prison. You know, that is a big part of what a lot of people in Trump's orbit want to do with this. And I say that because the guy who wrote this fucking thing is a dude named Kim Kochinelli is a major

anti left culture warfucker. One of his jobs under Trump was he worked under Chad Wolfe, who was the illegally the director of the DHS during the twenty twenty uprising. In September of twenty twenty, he ordered the intelligence branch of the Department of Homeland Security to downplay threats by white supremacists and instead focus on the danger of Antifa.

Under his watch, DHS also compiled and tel reports on journalists in Portland, Oregon might have some issue with this guy personally, and defended the abduction by federal agents of civilians in unmarked vehicles, right, you know, when people were being abducted off the streets of Portland. He was a big fan of that. Ken Guchinelli really likes that idea.

He is also essentially a white nationalist himself. In August of twenty nineteen, he announced a revised regulation to go into effect October fifteenth, twenty nineteen, that expanded the public charge requirements for legal immigration, made it harder to get green cards and visas if you were poor. Basically, he's stopped. He made they basically, if we might need something like food stamps, it's harder to get, you know, to immigrate

legally to the United States. He was asked, doesn't this kind of contradict, you know, that poem on the Statue of Liberty about welcoming you know, poor and persecuted people. Kucinelli suggested a revision to the poem on the Statute of Liberty, on the Statue of Liberty, give me you're tired and you're poor, who can stand on their own two feet and who will not become a public charge,

So that's that's cool. He also made a point that the poem referred to European immigrants, so you know, fuck those non white people, right, you know, like the poem was never meant for them. He's a fucking nazi, right, He's a white nationalist at the very least, like kN Kuchinelli is the kind of person that a decent society would google what the Romans did with the Tarpaian rocks when they had someone who was a trader to their system,

and that's what should happened to Ken Cucinelli. But instead he's trying to get the US military to invent Mexico. So that's good anyway, that's a Trump's Agenda forty seven policy on the cartels. I hope you all had a lot of fun anyway, Bye.