Trump actually thinks executing drug dealers would help. That’s the problem.

What the president's authoritarian fantasies reveal about how he understands crises.

By Ana Marie Cox February 28 at 10:11 AM
Ana Marie Cox is the host of Crooked Media's "With Friends Like These."

President Trump, according to Axios, has privately been talking up a new strategy in the nation’s ongoing struggle against the opioid epidemic: imposing the death penalty on drug dealers, just as they do in Singapore and Rodrigo Duterte’s Philippines. According to Axios’s multiple sources, Trump is given to “passionate speech[es]” in private on the subject, saying “he would love to have a law to execute all drug dealers here in America, though it would probably be impossible to get a law this harsh passed under the American system.”

Even if he does realize it’s an idle authoritarian daydream, Trump’s fascination with this brutal tactic is meaningful, as is the way he came upon it. What’s more, his casual musings upon it are part of larger pattern in which the administration uses crises to threaten the rest of us.

There’s no real need to explain that the summary execution of drug dealers is a bad idea, though it is a very, very bad idea. It’s enough to note that the country already tried an aggressive enforcement approach to drug crimes — the four-decade-long war on drugs — and among experts and law enforcement officers themselves, it is almost universally acknowledged as a massive failure in economic and practical terms. (Trump’s Justice Department is a notable outlier in that assessment.) Even more concerning, the war on drugs wound up being disproportionately waged against black and brown people. Escalating the possible sentence for drug crimes to death would just escalate the many injustices already present in a broken system. (This is also the argument that many civil liberties advocates make against charging drug dealers with murder.)

Trump doesn’t recognize any of this, of course. His pronouncements about drug policy come in two flavors, both of which suggest smugly unplumbed depths of ignorance: vague promises to keep drugs “out” of our country by building “the wall,” and sternly huffing about the need to “teach young people not to take drugs.” He doesn’t recognize that most of our opioid deaths are the result of drugs that are made in the United States or shipped in from China. He doesn’t recognize that “just saying no” has been proved ineffective by study after study.

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