General Trump Administration F**kery Thread (2025-2029)
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Hegseth Warned of Military Action if Mexico Fails to Meet Trump’s Border Demands
The defense secretary’s told Mexican security officials the U.S. was ready to take unilateral action against drug cartels
Feb. 28, 2025 at 5:13 pm
U.S. Marines patrol near the San Ysidro entry point on the San Diego side of the border with Mexico.
Hegseth told the officials that if Mexico didn’t deal with the collusion between the country’s government and drug cartels, the U.S. military was prepared to take unilateral action, according to people briefed on the Jan. 31 call. Mexico’s top brass who were on that call were shocked and angered, feeling he was suggesting U.S. military action inside Mexico, these people said. The Defense Department declined to comment.
Hegseth’s private warning—echoed by other Trump administration officials—now looms over Mexico’s trade talks with President Trump. Their fear: Demands that Mexico end fentanyl smuggling and migrant trafficking are quietly backed by potential U.S. military action—and not just 25% tariffs that would cripple the country’s economy.
Trump said those tariffs would go into effect on Mexico and Canada—the U.S.’s two biggest trading partners—on Tuesday, along with another 10% on China, sparking a mad dash among those countries in recent days to find a way to head off the levies.
“We still have three days,” Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said early on Friday. A spokesman for Sheinbaum declined to comment on January’s call with Hegseth.
Senior Mexican officials are focusing on delivering tangible results on the border and drugs that Trump can see as signs of progress, but there are worries that it won’t be easy to avoid tariffs as it was on Feb. 3, when Sheinbaum got a monthlong reprieve by sending 10,000 National Guard troops to the border.
In a post on his social-media platform Truth Social on Thursday, Trump said “drugs are still pouring into our Country from Mexico and Canada at very high and unacceptable levels.” Tariffs would go into effect “until it stops, or is seriously limited,” he said.
Mexico’s extraordinary handover this week of 29 drug gang bosses facing charges in the U.S. marks another concession for Trump, said former U.S. officials.
Another concession floated by Mexican officials involves one common trade rival: China. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Bloomberg TV on Friday that one “very interesting proposal” the Mexican government has made was matching the U.S. on China tariffs.
A spokesman for Mexico’s Economy Ministry declined to comment.
The proposal comes after Mexican authorities have recently raided shops and confiscated Chinese-made electronics and other goods thought to have breached import rules. Mexico’s government has also halted plans by Chinese electric vehicle maker BYD to open a factory in the country, launched a program to substitute imports from China, and started antidumping probes into imports of various Chinese products.
“There’s a sense that Trump wants specific things,” such as troop deployment, said one person familiar with the bilateral talks.
This week, half a dozen Mexican cabinet ministers flew to Washington where they met with Hegseth and other U.S. officials on Thursday to give an account of the actions Mexico has taken to shut down the fentanyl trade. Even before the meeting started, Mexico had already begun the historic rendition of the Mexican capos, including Rafael Caro Quintero, a notorious drug boss who is accused of killing Drug Enforcement Agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena in 1985.
Mexico’s Attorney General Alejandro Gertz said that the prisoner transfer was made at the request of the U.S. government on Thursday. Mexico’s government approved the handover invoking the country’s national-security laws because the extradition of many of those criminals had been bogged down in Mexican courts, four decades in the case of Caro Quintero and 11 years in the case of another criminal sent to the U.S., Gertz said at a news conference on Friday.
He said the criminals represented a threat to both countries. “There’s no way to justify sanctions against Mexico,” Gertz said.
The State Department said Thursday’s meeting represented a new stage of bilateral security cooperation. “Both parties agreed upon the importance of making sure there was continued action beyond meetings and suggested the implementation of a timetable and touchbacks to target clear goals and sustainable results,” State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce said in a statement on Friday.
Canadian officials are now aiming to convince the Trump administration that they have reinforced their border. A delegation of Canadian officials visited Washington in recent days to make the case that fentanyl and drugs are under control on the northern border, but officials say they suspect the numbers don’t seem to matter to Trump.
Trump has no incentive to allow Canada and Mexico appear to have solved the border issues, said Barry Appleton, an international trade lawyer and co-director of the New York Law School’s Center for International Law. By declaring an emergency on the border, Trump has a lot of leeway to impose tariffs, he said.
“If he loses his emergency, he loses his authority,” said Appleton. “So there’s nothing that could ever be good enough for the president on that until the president gets what he really wants. He wants a number of crown jewels, but he hasn’t actually decided what they are.”
Senior Mexican officials believe that they can make a deal with Trump on trade and migration. But the military tension with the U.S. is something new that is far harder to solve.
Hegseth’s suggestion of a potential U.S. military action struck a raw nerve for Mexico’s generals, who are brought up on stories of past U.S. armed interventions, including the 1846 Mexican-American war that cost the country half its territory.
Since the Jan. 31 call, Hegseth has repeated the same message publicly, from the U.S.-Mexico border, which he visited a few days after the call, to the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which he visited this week.
“We’re taking nothing off the table. Nothing,” he said when asked if he would rule out military strikes in Mexico.
The once-improbable scenario that the Trump administration could make good on its threats to take military action has reverberated in Washington.
On Thursday, a group of former U.S. and Mexican military and trade officials, congressional staffers, analysts and drug policy experts gathered around a long table on Capitol Hill for a three-hour exercise to lay out what would actually happen if the U.S. carried out military strikes in Mexico. The exercise mapped out severe economic disruptions between the two countries, border closings, violent flare-ups, and civil unrest on both sides of the border.
At the same time, it could endanger security collaboration to crack down on drug cartels, including programs that allow U.S. drones to feed intelligence to Mexican law enforcement.
That same day, a group of two dozen U.S. lawmakers released a resolution condemning “any call for U.S. military action in Mexico without authorization from the U.S. Congress and the consent of the Mexican government.” The document highlighted that any such action could trigger “severe bilateral consequences.”
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David Rothkopf (@djrothkopf.bsky.social)
There's no area of policy or executive action undertaken by the Trump Admin since it took office that pertains in any way to Russia/Russia's interests in which those interests were not advanced and ours relative to Russia were not weakened. Not one. The list of pro-Russian actions & shifts is long.
bsky.app
NaijaProdigy Redux
Veteran
And he wasnt even rude.
JD’s bytchass tried to lecture a head of state who has first hand dealings with Russia on diplomacy and got checked.
Ozymandeas
Veteran
exactly. i don't blame them. who would want to have their long-term agreements depend on a country that swifts this wildly every four years?
Trump is fracturing relationships that have been in place for almost a century. clown shyt.
disgusting and of course they do it on a Friday to take attention
Bleed The Freak
Superstar
Down fall of the republican party needs to be studied, they basically yes pastor teump everything he does
What happened today was one of the biggest disgraces in the history of this country on national TV by a President
Bleed The Freak
Superstar
This relationship in place has literally stopped the Adolf Hitler's of the world from coming back since.
It's been far from perfect but Jesus it's better than nothing
From his post after the oval office exchange: “I don’t want advantage.”
Might be the most revealing lie he’s ever told. The only thing this dude has ever talked about his entire life is getting or having the advantage and WINNING the deal. Suddenly it’s not important in regards to a grave Russian foreign policy matter
fukked up. Just so out in the open
Might be the most revealing lie he’s ever told. The only thing this dude has ever talked about his entire life is getting or having the advantage and WINNING the deal. Suddenly it’s not important in regards to a grave Russian foreign policy matter
fukked up. Just so out in the open
Bleed The Freak
Superstar
Kooley_High
All Star
He’s scared of an Afghanistan situation happening under him. Ukrainians evacuating from Kyiv to Europe or Poland. He wants to wash his hands of the conflict so if it goes bad he cant be blamed.
Trump Officials Split Over How Hard to Go on Mexican Cartels
A Mexican delegation will meet in Washington on Thursday to finalize a security deal, as White House officials debate a strategy for fighting cartels and stemming the flow of drugs across the border.
Trump Officials Split Over How Hard to Go on Mexican Cartels
A Mexican delegation will meet in Washington on Thursday to finalize a security deal, as White House officials debate a strategy for fighting cartels and stemming the flow of drugs across the border.
Feb. 27, 2025
Inside the White House, Trump officials are embroiled in a debate over whether to carry out military strikes against Mexican drug cartels or instead to collaborate with Mexican authorities to jointly dismantle criminal organizations.
On one side, several people familiar with the matter say, some U.S. officials are advocating for unilateral military action against cartel figures and infrastructure to stem the flow of drugs across the border. On the other side, those people say, some officials are arguing for increased partnership with the Mexican government to ensure, among other things, continued cooperation on the issue of migration.
Amid this split, a high-level delegation from Mexico arrived in Washington on Thursday and met with senior U.S. officials to hammer out a security agreement, a draft of which was crafted last week and will likely anchor the talks.
The visit came as the Mexican government began sending to the United States on Thursday nearly 30 top cartel operatives wanted by the U.S. authorities, according to a statement by the Mexican government.
In discussions so far, American officials have delivered vague ultimatums and unclear policy demands that Mexico dismantle the cartels or face the full force of Washington’s power, according to three people familiar with the preliminary negotiations who were not authorized to speak publicly, leading to confusion among Mexican officials.
Much of the confusion stems from the division inside the Trump administration on dealing with the drug cartels, several of which were recently designated by the State Department as foreign terrorist organizations.
One camp is being led by Sebastian Gorka, President Trump’s senior director for counterterrorism within the White House National Security Council, according to three current and former U.S. officials who were not authorized to speak publicly.
Mr. Gorka, a combative defender of Mr. Trump, has been working with a former officer in the Joint Special Operations Command, which oversees highly secretive U.S. military special operations, in an effort to push toward using American military power to take down Mexican drug lords and their operations on the ground, the current and former officials said.
A more cautious stance has been staked out by the White House’s Homeland Security Council, which is led by Stephen Miller. Mr. Miller has staffed his group with federal law enforcement officials who have deep experience in investigating, prosecuting and running capture operations in Mexico against cartel leaders with local counterparts.
According to two people familiar with the talks, Mr. Miller’s more measured approach is over concern that to go too hard against the cartels could shut down the broader cooperation with Mexican forces on one of his signature policy priorities: stopping migrants from reaching the U.S. border.
Officials at the National Security Council denied that there was any divergence of opinion within the Trump administration.
“Everyone from the president to his administration staff is committed to having all options on the table as it relates to addressing terrorist threats,” Brian Hughes, a spokesman for council, said. “There is no debate about how we will use all means necessary to protect Americans from Mexican drug cartels.”
More clarity may come this week, as Omar García Harfuch, Mexico’s secretary of security, and his delegation meet with their American counterparts. The delegation arrives just days before Mr. Trump has said he will impose a 25 percent tariff on Mexican imports as retribution for the Mexican government not doing enough to counter the flow of fentanyl.
The draft security framework, which will lay the foundation for future cooperation, currently calls for more cartel leader arrests and the creation of more Mexican units vetted by American law enforcement to target everything from money laundering to fighting drug groups on the ground, according to three people familiar with it. It is also expected to address migration and the border.
The stakes for Mexico could not be higher.
When the State Department designated six Mexican cartels as terror organizations earlier this month, that action set up the potential for Pentagon and intelligence resources to be deployed against the drug organizations, should Washington choose to do so.
As calls from Trump administration officials grow louder for a military solution to the cartels and to counter drug trafficking, particularly fentanyl, the Mexican government has strongly pushed back.
Ms. Sheinbaum has demanded that any U.S. military action against cartels be done in cooperation with Mexican forces and has vowed to protect Mexico’s sovereignty.
On Tuesday, Ms. Sheinbaum said in a news conference that her government “does not want operations of U.S. forces in Mexico,” adding that there is currently vast sharing of intelligence and information with American authorities.
Mexico aims for “coordination or cooperation, never invasion or subordination,” she said. Ms. Sheinbaum added that her government would pursue amendments to the Constitution to curb the work of foreign agents in Mexico, to ensure they don’t operate independently.
In an effort to aid the Mexican government, the C.I.A. has stepped up secret drone flights over the country, although the agency has not been authorized to use the drones to take any lethal action on its own, officials have said. For now, C.I.A. officers in Mexico have been passing information collected by the drones to Mexican officials.
The U.S. military’s Northern Command is also expanding its surveillance of the border, but unlike the C.I.A., it is not entering Mexican airspace.
“Sovereignty is not negotiable, that is a basic principle,” Ms. Sheinbaum told a news conference earlier this month, after the C.I.A. drone flights were revealed by The New York Times.
Mexican forces have ramped up their fight against the cartels amid the barrage of threats from Mr. Trump, hoping to placate Washington and show that they are willing and able partners in the war on the drug cartels.
In Sinaloa state, the hub of Mexico’s most powerful criminal syndicate, the Sinaloa Cartel, the Mexican government has carried out high-level arrests, drug lab busts and drug seizures that have disrupted fentanyl-production operations there.
In December, Mexican authorities also seized more than 20 million doses of fentanyl in Sinaloa, their biggest-ever synthetic opioid bust.
On Tuesday, Mexico’s defense secretary said that U.S. drones had been used in the effort to apprehend top figures in the Sinaloa Cartel. Mexican officials recently announced the arrest of José Ángel Canobbio Inzunza, said to be right-hand man of Iván Archivaldo Guzmán Salazar, a son of the notorious drug lord Joaquín Guzmán Loera, better known as El Chapo.
Mr. Canobbio Inzunza was indicted in the United States in November on charges of smuggling fentanyl into American cities like Chicago, where two of Ivan Guzmán’s younger brothers — Joaquín and Ovidio Guzmán López — are also facing charges.
But if the United States pushes Mexico too far, it may reverse decades of cooperation between the two nations, analysts and former diplomats have warned. Even before Mr. Trump was re-elected, ties between the United States and Mexico over the issue of drug cartels were already strained.
This summer, Mexican officials were outraged by what they believed to be direct American involvement in the kidnapping of one of the country’s most powerful drug lords, Ismael Zambada García, who was forcibly flown across the border where he was arrested by U.S. federal agents near El Paso. Despite U.S. assertions that the abduction was carried out by one of El Chapo’s sons without any American assistance on the ground, Mexican officials demanded the Justice Department provide more answers.
The episode involving Mr. Zambada García, who is facing sweeping drug charges in Brooklyn, came only a few years after another breach in U.S.-Mexico relations involving the cartels.
In October 2020, U.S. law enforcement agents arrested Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos, the former Mexican defense secretary, at the airport in Los Angeles on a sprawling federal indictment accusing him of having taken bribes from a violent Mexican cartel.
At its highest levels, the Mexican government reacted with a demonstration of collective anger that all but crippled joint U.S.-Mexico anti-narcotics operations. On the orders of William P. Barr, then the attorney general, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn ultimately dismissed the charges against General Cienfuegos and sent him back to Mexico.
King Kreole
natural blondie like goku
I would like to hear Ben Rhodes and David Frum tell us what the United States represented to the rest of the world in the pre-Trump era. Because this notion that Trump has represented a shift towards alignment with the world's autocracies can only be believed by people with a middle schooler's understanding of history and foreign policy. Biden literally dapped up the Saudi crown prince after he dismembered and dissolved in acid an American resident journalist and his stance/policy towards Israel turned the phrase "rules based international order" into an explicit joke. Rhodes himself called this out:
The pre-Trump Ukraine policy was pretty indefensible. As always, the crime that Trump is uniquely guilty of is boorishness. Which is why the only people rushing to defend Zelensky's honor right now are the DC Blob wedded to the military industrial complex and the European political elites who are perturbed that Trump is disturbing their gravy train in the form of the post-Cold War international consensus of American hegemonic patronage. All these histrionics are just the death rattles of the current international order, which for the past 50 years hasn't really been to the benefit of the average American, which is why the DC elite failed miserably at manufacturing public consent for endlessly funding Ukraine as a proxy in their quixotic gambit to overthrow Putin because their brains ossified in the 1980s.
And the rank and file members of the international community also don't give a shyt about the pivot or Zelensky getting dressed down in the Oval Office. He's currently occupying the position that many third world leaders who collaborated with American forces eventually found themselves in; gracelessly tossed aside when eventually deemed to be no longer useful. If his American manufactured Airbus A319 doesn't have a mysterious and unfortunate mechanical failure over the Atlantic Ocean on his flight back to Kiev then he'll have fared much better than most of his historical counterparts.
