Trump floated idea to ‘bomb the drugs,’ claims former adviser HR McMaster

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What would a second White House under Trump look like? In his new book, At War with Ourselves: My Service in the Trump White HouseLt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, who served as Donald Trump’s national security adviser for a year, describes the White House meetings as “exercises in competitive flattery,” with advisers greeting him with remarks like “your instincts are always right” or “never has anyone been treated so badly by the press.”

Trump, meanwhile, came up with crazy ideas and launched them: “Why don’t we just bomb the drugs?” (And also: “Why don’t we take out the entire North Korean army during one of their parades?”)

This is, of course, one man’s story. McMaster’s words should not be taken as gospel, and some of his frustration may stem from his firing, or from the fact that his foreign policy prescriptions were sometimes ignored by his boss. But it is a somewhat revealing look behind the scenes at policymaking in a White House led by a particularly erratic commander in chief who “reveled in and contributed to interpersonal drama in the White House and throughout the administration.”

It also shows how quickly Trump’s fantasies have seeped into the Republican Party, namely the “let’s just bomb Mexico to get rid of the cartels” line that Trump has been toying with since about 2019 (or perhaps more like in 2017, after he spoke to Rodrigo Duterte, former president of the Philippines, who had promised to kill 100,000 drug traffickers in his first six months in office). A few years earlier, in 2015, he had suggested that Mexico was sending rapists and drug traffickers across its southern border and that we should build a wall between the two countries, but it wasn’t until nine American citizens were killed in Mexico that Trump floated the idea of ​​declaring the cartels foreign terrorist organizations and using military force to wipe them out.

Trump’s 2019 statement has now become standard, notes The economist: The Republican primary debates featured a lot of tough talk on Mexico, particularly on the bombing front, with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis claiming he would send special forces there on day one. Right-wing think tanks have embraced the message, with articles headlined “It’s Time to Go to War on Transnational Drug Cartels.” Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene followed suit with other members of her party requested why “we’re going to war in Ukraine, and we’re not bombing the Mexican cartels.” Whether it’s economic protectionism (10 percent across-the-board tariffs, with 60 percent tariffs on Chinese imports) or bombing Mexico, Trump has almost magical powers to get other members of his party to accept something that was previously considered absurd.

Telegram founder arrested: French authorities on Saturday arrested Russian entrepreneur and founder of the Telegram messaging app Pavel Durov. The charges are currently somewhat unclear; a wide-ranging investigation is underway into the types of activities enabled by the app, including alleged content moderation failings and “complicity” in drug trafficking and the distribution of child pornography.

But it certainly seems like the authorities are after Durov because the app he created, which now has 900 million users, is a tool of freedom for much of the world, especially those living under authoritarianism. “The messaging app allows users to message each other via both unencrypted and encrypted chats, and to create ‘channels’ that other users can subscribe to,” he writes. Rode‘s Matthew Petti. “There’s no feed with an algorithm to manipulate, and founder Pavel Durov has pledged never to share user information with authorities.” This delicious anti-government fatigue has made Durov—who holds dual citizenship in France and the United Arab Emirates—more than a few enemies: the governments of China, Iran, Myanmar, and Durov’s native Russia, for example (where it’s being used to counter the power of mainstream propaganda about Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine). Now, apparently, France.

“POV: It’s 2030 in Europe and you’re being executed for liking a meme,” X-doyen Elon Musk tweeted in response to the Durov news. Venture capitalist David Sacks tweeted a list of four companies with targets on their backs (TikTok, Telegram, X, and Rumble) and asked, “Are you tired of me saying ‘I told you so’?” (Sacks was a prominent opponent of the US government’s ban/forced sale of TikTok to American owners.)

Scenes from New York: The crazy statistic of the day.

QUICK PULLS

  • In Japan, according to 2010 data, an estimated 884 people were over the age of 150. There was just one problem: It wasn’t true, their names were just being used by others to cash pension checks in a massive, messy, widespread fraud. (On that note, are “blue zones” fake? “Sardinia isn’t really a blue zone, it’s a fraud hotspot,” writes a Substacker named Cremieux.)
  • “As South Korea struggles to halt a steep decline in its birth rate, policymakers are struggling to convince many people in their 20s and 30s that parenthood is a better investment than stylish clothes or fancy restaurants,” Reuters reports. (“Even South Korea’s aggressive interest rate hikes over the past three years have failed to curb young people’s spending,” is probably the most Reuters-y sentence in this entire piece.)
  • NASA has become increasingly dependent on SpaceX’s help; now it has been asked by the government to bring two stranded astronauts home. Thanks, Elon!
  • “A federal judge in Texas on Monday temporarily blocked a Biden administration program that would have offered a path to citizenship to up to half a million undocumented immigrants married to U.S. citizens, ruling in favor of 16 Republican-led states that have sued the administration,” the report said. The New York Times. Judge J. Campbell Barker of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas wrote that the complaint before him raised legitimate questions about the executive branch bypassing Congress in setting immigration policy.
  • Let’s be honest, Zuckerberg:

(Incidentatlly.)

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