Hey guys, it's Andrew Eger with the bulwark. I don't know how you spent the day after Thanksgiving.

There's probably a lot of sleeping, a lot of digesting. Donald Trump was doing plenty of that, too,

but he did something else as well, something that not a lot of people were looking for or expecting.

It came as a shock to pretty much everybody. And that was that he promised a pardon for the former leader of Honduras,

a guy named Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was just convicted

in the United States of crimes related to drug trafficking back when he was running Honduras.

We're going to break it all down. Here to talk about it with me today, our very own Will Salatan.

Will, how you doing? How was your day after Thanksgiving?

My day was fine. Andrew, I thought that on Thanksgiving, the president is supposed to pardon a turkey, not a drug trafficker.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You do that before. Beforehand, you pardon the turkey. Then you sit down, you eat, you eat some other turkey.

And then while you're digesting that separate, less fortunate turkey, you get around to pardoning former, like,

tin pot despots who accepted bribes from El Chapo over the years. So this is a crazy story.

I mean, this is just like truly, truly bizarre. Nobody saw it coming in the slightest. This is a guy

who was convicted, again, in the United States, convicted on drug trafficking and weapons charges. I'm reading from the New York Times here, sentenced to 45 years in prison. Not an enormously geopolitically important country, Honduras. I mean, it's not like, you know, top five in terms of our allies. It's not a guy who wields a lot of power today. He had already been convicted. And so it's not like he was a guy who

was really on anybody's radar for, for, you know, Donald Trump to, like, be trading political

favors with or anything like that. But Will, walk me through a little bit what we know about what

happened here, because it's actually not very much. Yeah, we don't have much of a statement from

the president. So Friday afternoon, Donald Trump posts an endorsement of a candidate in the Honduran presidential election. This is our guy. He does it actually a couple of times over the Thanksgiving break. A different guy. Not this guy. Not this guy. This is the former guy. He posts that. And then he posted again endorsing this guy, this other guy. And then as just a throw in, he's like, oh, by the way, I'm pardoning this guy, one Orlando Hernandez, right? Who the hell is this guy, right? Apparently related, because he puts it in the same truth post. He's like, I'm endorsing this candidate. We need this

party to win. By the way, Andrew, Trump says in these posts, endorsing the Honduran candidate,

I'm endorsing this guy because we need to beat the narco terrorists. And another one, he says,

we've got to beat the narco communist. It's always narco this narco-that. And then he just throws in a pardon of this massively convicted drug trafficker. So where does the narco come in? It seems like we're on the side of the narco's. Yeah, this is such a bewildering story. And again, we're all just kind of getting up to speed on this because I think your first question, I assume, Will, like mine, when we read about the pardon was who? We know, we're not, we're not, we did not report on this trial. Again, there's a lot of, but a lot of news happening all throughout the world. But he's such an interesting guy because while he was leader of Honduras, it seemed like he talked a pretty big game about, you know, stamping out the drug trade. And he had like photo

ops with Obama and Trump and Biden and like seemed to be like an ally of the United States in a lot of

...