Trump is targeting alleged drug boats. Why is he now pardoning a drug trafficker?

Here & Now Anytime

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4.1 • 953 Ratings

🗓️ 1 December 2025

⏱️ 19 minutes

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Summary

President Trump wants to pardon former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was convicted of trafficking drugs into the United States. At the same time, his administration is blowing up what they call drug boats in the Caribbean and Pacific. Juan Sebastián González of the Georgetown Americas Institute explains more about Trump’s actions in Latin America.

And, bipartisan support is growing for congressional review of those strikes after multiple reports have raised questions about whether at least one of the strikes amounts to a war crime. Franco Ordoñez, a White House correspondent for NPR, joins us.

Then, for the first time since 1988, the United States will not commemorate World AIDS Day. Dr. Monica Gandhi of the University of California, San Francisco, explains what the move says about the Trump administration’s policy to fight HIV and AIDS.

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0:00.0	Support for here and now anytime comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software for technical computing and model-based design.
0:09.2	MathWorks accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com.
0:17.5	WBUR Podcasts, Boston.
0:22.9	Is being painted at a counter-narcotics operation, but it walks, talks, and looks like a regime change operation.
0:28.9	The president talks a big game about stopping drug trafficking.
0:32.6	So why is he planning to pardon a convicted drug trafficker?
0:45.8	No. is he planning to pardon a convicted drug trafficker? It's Monday, December 1st, and this is here and now anytime from NPR and WBUR.
0:51.0	I'm Chris Bentley.
0:54.6	Today on the show, some key Republicans on Capitol Hill are joining Democratic calls for oversight
1:01.0	of the military strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean.
1:05.5	Also, it's World AIDS Day, but you wouldn't know it listening to the White House.
1:11.0	This is coming on 10 months of attacks on the HIV response.
1:15.7	So it's not at all inconsistent with how the administration, in this administration, has been
1:22.0	behaving towards HIV.
1:23.7	Why State Department employees are reportedly being told to refrain from publicly promoting World AIDS Day.
1:31.3	That's coming up at about 15 minutes. But first, Congress is investigating the Trump administration's bombing campaign in the Caribbean, which, according to an NPR analysis, has killed at least 82 people across
1:45.6	at least 21 airstrikes in the last three months. The White House says the victims were smuggling
1:51.8	drugs, but has provided no evidence to support those claims. Then over the weekend, we learned
1:58.2	that in the first strike of the campaign on September 2nd,
2:01.9	Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth himself ordered the use of lethal force, including a second
2:07.5	follow-up strike to kill all the survivors.
2:11.2	Hegseth called that reporting fabricated, inflammatory, and derogatory, and then went on to defend the killings.
	...

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