No, the headline does not deceive you. The New York Times got its pants in a bunch over President Donald Trump daring to refer to violent Mexican drug cartels as “terrorists” because it could supposedly harm the economy.
“How Labeling Cartels ‘Terrorists’ Could Hurt the U.S. Economy,” read the asinine January 22 news item from Times correspondents Maria Abi-Habib and Simon Romero. The authors railed against Trump’s executive order designating the cartels as “foreign terrorist organizations” and claimed that it “could force some American companies to forgo doing business in Mexico rather than risk U.S. sanctions.” Yeah, how dare Trump treat the Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels flooding America’s streets with deadly fentanyl that’s killing over 200 Americans daily as synonymous with terrorism, right? #Migraine
The authors made themselves look even more ridiculous in retrospect when they had to describe what Trump’s order actually does:
The executive order, which Mr. Trump signed on Monday, is intended to apply maximum pressure on Mexico to rein in its dangerous drug trade. The designation, more generally, also gives his administration more power to impose economic penalties and travel restrictions, and potentially even to take military action in foreign countries.
What’s wrong with this you ask? Only The Times appears to know in their distorted reporting. Even CBS News conceded December 7 that “Mexican cartels are the main source of finished fentanyl that is distributed into the U.S., with China being the main supplier of the precursor chemicals and pill presses the cartels use to produce the drugs, according to a report released in May by the DEA.”
But in the world of The Times, which is apparently more concerned with economic implications rather than the life-or-death nature of the drug crisis plaguing Americans being fomented by the cartels:
[D]isentangling cartel operations from U.S. interests in Mexico could be immensely complicated. Mexico is the United States’ largest trade partner of goods, and many American companies have manufacturing operations there.
Our World in Data released a report in July 2024 that found that “tens of thousands of people have died due to fighting between drug cartels in Mexico” in recent years. But The Times, completely missing the bigger picture, was intent on trying to drum up fear about Trump addressing the cartels like terrorists because these cartels were embedded in the legal economy now, too:
[T]hese criminal networks have extended their operations far beyond drug trafficking and human smuggling. 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 brain rot is strong with this one.
