It Could Happen Here - Agenda 47: Trump's Plan To Invade Mexico

Episode Date: April 12, 2024

Robert Evans walks you through the history of Donald Trump's ambition to fire missiles into Mexico and maybe invade, in a doomed attempt to stop fentanyl trafficking.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and

expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. of Google search. Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. Hello and welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart in this week, a podcast about Agenda 47, Donald Trump's plan for, you know, what to do if he winds up winning re-election and being back in all of our lives in the sense of having political power, as opposed to just backing all of our lives because he never

shuts the hell up, and neither do any of the journalists who report on him. So we're talking about that all week. You've been listening to the episodes put together by my colleagues. Today, I'm going to be talking about Trump's border policy, particularly his promise to declare war on the cartels and use the United States military to attack them. Before I 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 it. He's on chemo in the hospital. Just finished chemo, 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 very soon here, but I just wanted to 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 of 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, I thought you were 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 of, 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 or 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 U.S. military to kill, quote unquote, drug dealers, right? Now, over the last 15 years or so, mainstream Republican policy has actually caught up to my old boss.

And now, President Trump has included in Agenda 47 a promise to invade Mexico with U.S. special forces. That's not the extent of the promise. We will be talking about that all through this fun episode. On December 22, 2023, 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 going to 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 sided against the United States and with the cartels. They're making more money than they've ever made before, times 10. 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 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. You know, Trump came up with that one more or less on his own. Didn't need to be scripted.

Now, Trump goes on to state after this that when he is president again, the United States government will treat cartels the same way they treated ISIS, which, you might recall, still exists and recently carried out an attack in Russia. Republicans might note that this attack was by ISIS-K or ISIS-Khorasan, which is true. And boy, howdy, does Afghanistan come back into the story in a little bit. So just just just keep that in mind. But first, let's continue with Trump. keep that in mind. But first, let's continue 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 45 years. Now, it's important to fact check things

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?, 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 45 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 45 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 2023 that under his presidency, quote, drug overdose deaths declined nationwide

for the first time in nearly 30 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 45 years, right? Which is, again, I mean, it's just wrong in its face, because earlier he said for 30 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 in 2018. 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 2020. 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 fentanyl, which he describes as an existential threat to the country and makes the claim that basically when I was president, all that, all that stuff was we were taking care of it. It was all declining.

And then when Biden took over, it got a lot worse. No, the rate of fentanyl use and fentanyl 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 the cartel, with material support of a terrorist organization, and thus allow nightmarish 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 47 website ends. The drug cartels and their allies in the past. Here's how this particular rant on the Agenda 47 website ends. The drug cartels and their allies in 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 kingpins 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 U.S. missiles to destroy so-called drug factories, specifically those producing either fentanyl or methamphetamine.

Obviously, cartels do operate sizable facilities 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 2019. So while the coronavirus is spreading, our president, rather than focusing on a response, is 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, and this is from the New York Times,

some participants felt the meetings were of little use because officials tended to perform for Mr. 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 while I think of animals. right now. So why don't we just roll to ads for a second while I think of animals? and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast Post Run High is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High.

It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI

to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though.

I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better.

Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel.

I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian, Elian. Elian, Elian. Elian, he looks so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation.

Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. So I'm going to continue that quote from the New York Times. When the idea of military intervention was brought up at one such meeting, Mr. Trump turned to Brett Giroir, who was there in his role as the U.S. Assistant Secretary for Health. Mr. Giroir was also a four-star admiral in the commissioned corps of the U.S. 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 Mr. Trump singled out Mr. Giroir that he had mistakenly thought he was in the military because of his dress uniform, according to two participants in the meeting. Mr. Giroir, in his response, suggested putting lead to target, the two participants recalled. And that seems likely. Giroir 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, I mean, again, and these are all maybe not the best sources, but assuming 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 Giroir 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, right? His argument, though, was not so much that we should do it, but that if we threaten Mexico with military action, that will force the Mexican government to be more aggressive against the cartels. Now, William Barr is not a guy I consider very smart, and this is in fact a dumb idea. Because, like, Mexico's government has tried a bunch of different ways to fight the cartels. They haven't destroyed them, right? The current president of Mexico 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 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, we might hit the wrong target, right? Basically, civilian casualties could happen. So we should avoid that. That really kind of showcases how fucking dangerous someone like bar is because his plan is he's thinking he's playing 4d chess or whatever it's like yes you know the mexican government will get scared and they'll take care of these cartels for us but when you start floating that idea to a guy named trump he's going to 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 plan to bully Mexico into destroying the cartels doesn't work because they can't or because they don't want to be bullied, then 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 going to 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 Barr 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 Barr was suggesting or something like what Girard was suggesting, at some point, Trump's going to need to use military assets to strike Mexico, if only to 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 U.S. servicemen. It certainly avoids the risk of them getting captured. Anyway, I'm going to quote from the New York Times again here. At least twice during 2020, Mr. Trump privately asked his defense secretary, Mr. 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 Mr. Trump had a habit of calling all missiles Patriot missiles, according to two former senior administration officials. I just find that funny. Like, man, you are the commander-in-chief, and you don't know, like, you don't even know that, like, I don't expect the president to Like, man, you are 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 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 2020 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 saying it's Canada? Because they'd have to kind of cross a lot of space to do that. Are you saying Guatemala's 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 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 known 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 López 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 think 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, Mexico has to shift votes in the United States. But, you know, it is interesting. You don't often hear a world leader, particularly not of the U.S.'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. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast Post Run High is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real inspiring stories from the people you know, follow and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart

of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech

from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with.

His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go, and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian González story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. So the opposition candidate in next year's Mexican presidential elections also made a statement that, it was a little bit more moderated than Obrador's, 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 U.S. 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, like, 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 dumb fucks 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 Tuesday 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 2020. One of the things we learned

post-Trump presidency is that he had ordered the 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 & Friends. I think that was a mistake. Now, I want to discuss for a second how impossible it is for this plan to work. As I 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. Those facilities certainly exist, but they are not like the large centralized factories that, I don't know, like a military rival would use 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 just, 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 Raqqa, took over Mosul, and then we beat them up, you know? We kicked 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 and hold 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 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 lid on things. So number one, this victory, he claims, wasn't a total victory. And number two, the reason why ISIS was knocked out of Mosul 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 can 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 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 amount of support it could

potentially build for the fucking cartels is substantial. But even beyond that, the idea that you could knock these 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 Mosul, it's fanciful, right? It's a farce. Now, speaking of farces, I want to talk about kind of 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 in their attempts to destroy Taliban drug labs. more force in their attempts to destroy Taliban drug labs. Obviously, Taliban funded a lot of their war effort with the sale of opium, you know, heroin or 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 legs 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 airstrikes and special operations attacks on Taliban drug labs in 2017. 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 2019. They gave up in two years because they couldn't do it. They were bad at it. Now, the fact that this kind of plan that Trump has 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 other Republicans want it to fail, which is that declaring war on cartels allows them to justify a major power grab and destroy or end the lives of U.S. 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's 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. The paper makes it clear that illegal immigration is just as much a priority as fentanyl 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, you know, take care of things themselves. And since the Mexican government is not really capable at 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 u.s ports will be closed whenever the number of illegal immigrant apprehensions at the border increases past a certain level right so they're also saying and again you get the feeling from this paper while trump always harps on the drugs and the horrors of fentanyl, it's very clear from this paper, there is concern, if not more concerned, about the fact that non-white people are entering the country. Quote, while costly to the economy, this, closing ports, would incentivize the Mexican government to crack down on human smugglers, migrant caravans, and cartel trafficking networks. Now, under the fourth and final phase of this plan, the U.S. 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 on to the last phase, the victory phase, which includes these suggestions. Congress should enact legislation that creates enhanced penalties for U.S. citizens found guilty of collaborating with the cartels. Punishment should include mandatory minimum federal sentencing of 15 years in prison for working with cartels labeled as transnational criminal organizations and mandatory minimum sentencing of 15 years in prison for working with cartels labeled as transnational criminal organizations and mandatory minimum sentencing of 25 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 as tantamount to engaging in terrorism against the United States. framework as 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 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, right? 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 Ken Cuccinelli. Ken is a major anti-left culture war fucker. One of his jobs under Trump was he worked under Chad Wolf, who was illegally the director of the DHS, during the 2020 uprising. In September of 2020,

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 intel 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 Guccinelli really likes that idea. He is also essentially a white nationalist himself. In August of 2019, he announced a revised regulation to go into effect October 15th, 2019, that expanded the public charge requirements for legal immigration, made it harder to get green

cards and visas if you were poor. Basically, he stopped, he made it basically, if you might need something like food stamps, it's harder to get, get you know to immigrate legally to the united states he was asked uh doesn't this kind of contradict you know that poem on the statue of liberty about welcoming you know poor and persecuted people cuccinelli suggested a revision to the poem on the statute of liberty on the statue of liberty give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet and who will not become a public charge. So that's cool. He also made a point that the poem referred to European immigrants. So, you know, fuck those non-white people, right? The poem was never meant for them. He's a fucking Nazi, right? He's a white nationalist at the very least.

Ken Cuccinelli is the kind of person that a decent society would, um, Google what the Romans did with the Tarpeian rocks when they had someone who was a traitor to their system, and that's what should happen to Ken Cuccinelli. But instead, he's trying to get the U.S. military to invade Mexico, so that's good. Anyway, that's, uh, Trump's Agenda 47 policy on the cartels uh i hope you all had a lot of fun anyway bye it could happen here is a production of cool zone media for more podcasts from cool zone media visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources.

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