Secretary Marco Rubio meets with Honduran President-Elect Nasry Asfura at the Department of State in Washington, D.C., January 12, 2026. (Official State Department photo by Freddie Everett)

Since the January 3 U.S. invasion of Venezuela, reporters, politicians and public have grilled Donald Trump about a glaring contradiction in the war-on-drugs argument used to justify bombing Venezuela and abducting its sitting president. Just a month before the violent capture of Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, Trump pardoned convicted cocaine trafficker and former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, sentenced to 45 years by a New York District Court.

After the Honduras pardon and with the Venezuela attack in the wings, the administration already knew the optics on this were not going to be good. Releasing Hernandez caused an immediate uproar. Journalists and members of Congress demanded explanations. Hondurans, in the midst of a hotly contested election, denounced the U.S. move to return a hated dictator to a turbulent political scene. Trump defended the pardon, while Marco Rubio dodged questions, refusing to take a position on yet another of his boss’s seemingly eccentric decisions.

So in early December, the administration and its extreme right allies launched Operation Honduras Whitewash. To lead it, they enlisted none other than Matt Gaetz, the former Republican congressman forced to resign over ethics scandals, to do an exclusive interview with Juan Orlando Hernández, the former Honduran president and prisoner convicted in what the U.S. Justice Department heralded as one of the largest drug, arms and corruption cases in judicial history.

The Dec. 10 interview, at under twenty minutes, merits close examination as a textbook example of spin and a window into Trump strategies. It lays bare Orwellian tricks for how to build a false narrative that directly contradicts your previous narrative, the degree of perversion of far-right “family values”, and the long-game rapacity behind Trump’s foreign policy in Latin America.

Setting the Scene

Before going into the geopolitics, it’s important to look carefully at these two men beaming out of One America’s split screen.

The news anchor, professionally coiffed and tanned, smiles confidently. The guest appears dapper having recently traded prison scrubs for suit and tie.

The teaser paragraph above the interview reads:

The 38th President of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández Alvarado, gives his first exclusive interview to One America News following his pardon by President Donald Trump. Alvarado (sic) had been serving a 45-year sentence for drug-trafficking and related firearms offenses.

Is he a victim of Joe Biden’s lawfare, or is he one of the greatest narco-traffickers of all time? Matt Gaetz finds out.

Everyone who has come to the page knows that the whole point of the interview is to convince the public of the first part of that dichotomy. Never mind that that means erasing years of investigation and undercover work carried out by hundreds of U.S. government officials, including dedicated DEA agents, lawyers and judges, counternarcotics agents, academics, experts and congressional offices of both parties. The point now is to recast the villain as hero.

Gaetz has a tough task before him–to drum up sympathy for a convicted drug and arms trafficker and political strongman responsible for the assassination of at least 38 of his own people in protests after he stole the 2017 election. The network titles the interview “Nowhere to Run”, to aid in portraying Hernández as an innocent victim.

Hernández, called JOH by his initials, has been prepped to present himself as the victim of a Deep State conspiracy orchestrated by the Biden administration. As if the judiciary were not an independent branch of government, JOH claims to have suffered a “wrongful conviction” wrangled through “Biden lawfare”, while thanking Trump repeatedly and obsequiously for correcting this “injustice”.

Gaetz steers the president-turned-felon into confirming the bizarre theory that the New York District court investigated, tried and prosecuted the Honduran politician for drug trafficking and arms possession solely as political punishment for cooperating with the first Trump administration to block migration flows to the U.S.

Gaetz frequently resorts to journalistic ventriloquism to do this, like this question:

“So you believe that they were targeting you because you took positions on migration that would not have allowed for open borders and people just moving through Honduras and Nicaragua and El Salvador and Guatemala unchecked? You think it was a consequence of your border policies?”

Hernández, whose English is not good, only has to say yes.

The interview attempts to rewrite history with JOH, steered by Gaetz, suddenly changing role from convicted trafficker to a crusader against drug trafficking. He maligns Honduran former president Mel Zelaya and current president Xiomara Castro, and sidesteps the question of his brother Tony’s 2019 conviction........

© CounterPunch