Press Victims

Erick Erickson on Jan 24, 2025

The American press corps covers Republican presidential administrations very differently from Democratic presidential administrations and covers Donald Trump's administration differently from everything. To the press, Donald Trump is a bad man -- a would-be authoritarian tyrant. Therefore, any policy is presumed to be bad, and it will be covered by highlighting victims. That can lead to farce.

In his first day in office, the President, Trump, not Biden (hallelujah), signed an executive order designating Mexican drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. At the end of his previous term in office, Trump had headed in that direction. But with COVID and more, the clock ran out before it happened. Now, it was one of the first actions he took his first day back in the Oval Office.

Designating any entity a foreign terrorist organization makes it easier to remove its members from the United States, restrict access to banking and sanction entities that do business with the organizations. A vast array of legal, financial and diplomatic measures spring into action.

The press, however, cannot help itself. The New York Times needed to cover the victims of the policy. Having long ignored the victims of the Mexican drug cartels, suddenly the Times reports that the Mexican drug cartels are so interwoven into the fabric of Mexico's legal society that some lawful businesses and employees of lawful businesses could be hurt because the lawful businesses are actually owned by the Mexican cartels.

"They are now embedded in a wide swath of the legal economy, from avocado farming to the country's billion-dollar tourism industry, making it hard to be absolutely sure that American companies are isolated from cartel activities," the Times reported. "The foreign terrorist designation could lead to severe penalties -- including substantial fines, asset seizures and criminal charges -- on companies and individuals found to be paying ransom or extortion payments. U.S. companies could also be ensnared by standard payments made to Mexican companies that a cartel controls without the American companies' knowledge."

Reading all of this, including that American banks might stop processing payments for illegal aliens working on American farms to prevent them from wiring money home to relatives who might work adjacent to cartel businesses, might make you ask, "So what?" What the Times cannot bring itself to explicitly say, but its reporting certainly shows, is that Mexico is a failed narco-terror state. The drug cartels are infested in and intertwined with the legal economy. The only way to fight them is to do as Trump has done.

Only the American political press could think this is bad. But the larger issue should probably be what else can we do? The American political establishment and press operate as if the status quo is bad, but there is no desire to change it. Weekly, some talking head on television expresses why we need illegal immigrants in the country to do things on the cheap. By calling them "undocumented," the talking heads avoid the reality that the people broke the law to come here. Perhaps we could do something differently.

Trump may have many faults, but one of his best attributes is recognizing the rot in the status quo and attempting to extricate it from the system. Perhaps he removes too much in some cases or not enough in others, but to our south is a failed narco-terror state with major politicians in the country too closely tied to monsters who murder Americans with drugs. Those same monsters, in addition to flooding our border with drugs, flood it with humans, often trafficked, and some who wish to cut the line to come here. That status quo is unacceptable.

Politicians of both parties have, in the past, decided they could not designate drug cartels as terror organizations because of the economic impact of doing so. What is the economic impact, however, of the dead, dying and addicted Americans lost to drugs? No one wanted to look at the impact from that angle except Trump. Now, by doing so, he has the American press portraying the drug cartels and those tied to the cartels as victims while the press ignores the American victims of those cartels.

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To find out more about Erick Erickson and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

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