Trump Isn’t Defeating Terrorists. He’s Helping Them.

While claiming to crack down on terrorists in his second term, the president has actually benefited them in a host of ways.

“Cartels of terrorists across our hemisphere, enabled by adversaries, created and profited from chaos,” remarked Secretary of “War” Pete Hegseth at the Americas Counter Cartel Conference in early March. “What creates chaos? No leadership creates chaos.” The Christian nationalist crusader, whose Pentagon is in constant upheaval, was referring to the Biden administration—but his words are a much more apt description of his department, and of the Trump administration broadly. The president and his acolytes claim that they’re cracking down on terrorists, but even in the best cases, their efforts have proved costly and ineffective; in the worst, they’ve actually benefited terrorists, helping them swell their ranks and even enriching them.

The boat strikes that Hegseth has boasted about are a prime example of the former. “Under President Trump for the first time in history, the Department of War is on the offense against narco-terrorists,” he said at the conference. Putting aside the ethical implications of killing at least 185 people without trials, even when they’re clearly surrendering, and the damage such attacks do to our moral standing in the world, the strikes have also proven rather ineffective. While there’s evidence that certain drug routes from Venezuela have been shut down, the cartels have simply shifted to new routes and other methods of export, moving cocaine through cargo ships in multiple ports across Latin America. As Alex Papadovassilakis wrote for InSight Crime, “Concealment within legitimate cargo remains the main method for reaching consumer markets in the United States, Europe, and beyond, with traffickers routing loads through ports in countries like the Dominican Republic.” Papadovassilakis also noted that even people in “go-fast boats” who are actually transporting drugs are likely not direct members of the cartels but instead local fishermen and merchants doing one-off deals.

Gen. Francis L. Donovan, the head of U.S. Southern Command, essentially acknowledged the limited reach of the murderous strikes when he testified before the Senate........

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