Trump's Assassination Squads: His 2nd Term Plan To Deal With Drug Crisis

You know, when Trump manages to clinch another term in November, the word on the street is he’s looking to send an army into Mexico.

And not just any sort, but an assassination squad.

He won’t be messing around come second term.

His reasons?

Time to take out the drug cartels.

This is clearly in response to the fentanyl crisis.

And our President is ready to wage war against Mexico over it in order to protect his people, our families.

Classic Trump move, right?

REPORT: Donald Trump plans to send "Assassination Squads" into Mexico to kill Cartel leaders if elected president.

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According to a new report from the Rolling Stone, Trump told people close to him that the U.S. military has "tougher killers than they do" and doesn't care… pic.twitter.com/hpEeOZhQUN

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) May 8, 2024

Rolling Stone reports:

If he wins a second term in November, Donald Trump wants to covertly deploy American assassination squads into Mexico soon after he’s sworn into office again, according to three people who’ve discussed the matter with the former U.S. president.

Both during and after his presidency, the presumptive 2024 Republican nominee has floated different ideas for bombing or invading Mexico in response to the American fentanyl crisis and to “wage WAR” on notorious drug cartels. As president, Trump even thought it was possible to bomb the cartels’ drug labs, and then potentially pin the strikes on another country, according to his former defense secretary, Mark Esper.

What was once a fringe notion that senior Trump administration officials quickly moved to shut down has now become a mainstream GOP policy proposal, including among influential Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill and conservative think tanks.

Trump is currently campaigning for the White House on a public vow to, in his words, “make appropriate use of Special Forces, cyber warfare, and other overt and covert actions to inflict maximum damage on cartel leadership, infrastructure, and operations.”

The former president has not presented specific details in public about these plans — for example, how many U.S. troops he’d be willing to send into sovereign Mexican territory. But, the three sources tell Rolling Stone, in conversations with close MAGA allies, including at least one Republican lawmaker, Trump has privately endorsed the idea of covertly deploying — with or without the Mexican government’s consent — special-ops units that would be tasked with, among other missions, assassinating the leaders and top enforcers of Mexico’s powerful and most notorious drug cartels.

In some of these discussions, Trump has insisted that the U.S. military has “tougher killers than they do” and pondered why these assassination missions haven’t been done before, arguing that eliminating the heads of cartels would go a long way toward hobbling their operations and striking fear into the hearts of “the kingpins.” (In fact, versions of this strategy have indeed been tried before in the long-running international war on drugs, including in Mexico, where the nation’s government, with U.S. support, devoted substantial resources to wiping out as many cartel bosses as possible.

During some of these conversations, Trump has likened these proposals to the 2019 military raid that he ordered that resulted in the death of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, insisting that the U.S. should approach drug cartel leadership in the same manner. One of the sources, who discussed the issue with Trump earlier this year, recalls the ex-president saying that the U.S. government should have a “kill list of drug lords,” as this source describes Trump’s ideas, of the most powerful and infamous cartel figures that American Special Forces would be assigned to kill or capture in a potential second Trump administration.

Trump’s spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment on this story.

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As Rolling Stone reported last year, Trump directed his policy advisers to supply him with a menu of military options for attacking Mexican drug cartels, if he reconquers the White House. This included scenarios for potential airstrikes, drone attacks, U.S. troop deployments, and other forms of warfare for taking on the major drug cartels’ leaders, who Trump has long derided as some “bad hombres.”

Just a few short years ago, the concept of a Trump or any modern administration invading or bombing Mexico — including without the cooperation of Mexico’s president — would have been widely viewed as a fanciful scheme or a mere outburst, even coming from a figure as extreme as the 45th commander in chief. However, in recent years, the policy prescriptions have gone far beyond Trump’s venting of frustrations, and entered the Republican Party mainstream.

MAGA-aligned think tanks, such as the Center for Renewing America and the America First Policy Institute, have released policy papers that forcefully endorse wielding significant military force against these criminal organizations. One of these policy blueprints — from CRA and bylined by former Trump official Ken Cuccinelli — was privately briefed to Trump in 2023, and is bluntly titled: “It’s Time to Wage War on Transnational Drug Cartels.”

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, formerly Trump’s top rival in the 2024 GOP presidential primary, pledged that if he were elected president, he would order Special Forces to enter Mexico “on Day One.”