Apparently unsatisfied with merely playing apologist for human traffickers, murderers, rapists, vagrants, and flag-burners, the American left has now added bloodthirsty narcoterrorists to the list of people they’re committed to defending.
Earlier this week, the Trump administration released footage of the U.S. military annihilating a drug-filled boat containing 11 members of the Tren de Aragua (TDA) cartel off the coast of Venezuela. As The New York Post reported, “This is the first known attack on a cartel since Trump authorized the military to carry out such operations earlier this year.”
“TDA is a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization, operating under the control of Nicolas Maduro, responsible for mass murder, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, and acts of violence and terror across the United States and Western Hemisphere,” Trump wrote on Truth Social following the strike. “Please let this serve as notice to anybody even thinking about bringing drugs into the United States of America. BEWARE!”
Eleven dead cartel members trying to funnel deadly drugs into the United States should earn bipartisan applause. Overdose deaths skyrocketed under the Biden administration as drugs poured in across a wide-open southern border, crossing 100,000 in 2022 and 2023 before dipping slightly to 80,000 in 2024, according to CDC data.
By targeting the cartel, Trump was also fulfilling a key campaign promise he made last year to take the fight to the cartels and deploy the military to do the job. In a welcome contrast to the endless trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives spent by previous administrations on ill-advised nation-building projects, Trump was using the U.S. military how it was actually intended to be used: to defend the American homeland and protect the American people.
But for Democrats, the media, and the broader liberal establishment, who all must reflexively object to everything Trump does, the strike was an egregious violation of some unwritten code that says foreign drug cartels trying to poison Americans should be treated with kid gloves.
During a press conference in the Oval Office on Wednesday, one reporter questioned why the 11 TDA terrorists were “killed instead of taken into custody.” The official Black Lives Matter X account, meanwhile, said that Trump “murdered 11 people,” calling it an “execution.” Other high-profile left-wing accounts accused Trump of being a “war criminal” for attacking a “civilian vessel” – even if that vessel was being used to transport deadly drugs.
This is hardly an isolated incident of liberals planting their flag on the most indefensible ground imaginable. The same crowd that wailed over a cartel boat getting turned into chum just got done losing its mind over Trump’s order limiting flag-burning – yet another 80–20 issue where normal people are on one side and the left is sprinting to the other. They tripped over each other to shout about how it was “unconstitutional” without pausing to question how it sounds to the vast majority of Americans to defend the public desecration of the nation’s most unifying symbol.
The same reflex is at work in their canonization of Kilmar Abrego-Garcia, the illegal alien who became the face of the liberal “resistance” to the Trump administration’s deportation agenda earlier this year. Prominent Democrats literally flew to El Salvador for a photo op and turned a criminal credibly accused of human trafficking and domestic abuse into the face of their party for weeks.
It is undisputed that Abrego-Garcia entered the country illegally, there is ample evidence tying him to MS-13, his own wife had sought protection from him, and police had investigated him before for human trafficking. Yet the left elevated him to hero status because it gave them another cudgel to swing at Trump. They chose the slogan over the victim, the narrative over the truth, and the optics over the law.
And then there’s Karmelo Anthony, the teenager who fatally stabbed a fellow student at a track meet and was subsequently cast by liberals as the “real” victim in the case. Even though another boy lay dead, Democrats insisted that his killer was actually the sympathetic figure in the tragedy.
And of course, in perhaps the most egregious and telling example of all, we cannot forget that many on the left blamed Jews following Hamas’s surprise attack on Israel two years ago. In the United States, even as Jewish students were verbally and physically assaulted and forced to barricade themselves inside buildings, leftists insisted that the anti-Semitic attackers were the real victims.
Every time, the script is identical: invert guilt and innocence, center the offender, erase the harmed, and demand that the rest of us accept this dystopian vision of the world.
This is why the left is hemorrhaging cultural influence and why Democrats are more unpopular than they care to admit. Ordinary people can smell this perversion of basic right and wrong a mile away. They want a country where the flag is honored, criminals are punished, borders mean something, and foreign terrorists live in fear.
So why do liberals keep committing this reprehensible error?
One reason is that their obsession with identity politics and the victim hierarchy has hopelessly corrupted their moral compass. They view everything through the lens of woke dogma, so much so that when a black teenager fatally stabs a white teenager at a track meet, they refuse to even consider that the “person of color” might be at fault.
The other even more obvious reason is their blinding hatred of Trump that compels them to oppose whatever he touches, even when it’s manifestly popular and obviously good for the country.
Which brings us back to the boat. Faced with a choice between protecting American communities and narcoterrorists, Trump chose the former, and the left chose the latter. They’re not mad because 11 cartel traffickers are at the bottom of the ocean as much as they’re mad because Trump put them there and reminded the country what moral clarity looks like.
If Democrats keep siding with flag-burners, traffickers, and violent criminals of all sorts, they won’t just lose another news cycle. They’ll lose the country even more than they have, and then they’ll lose more elections – and they’ll deserve to.
Shane Harris is the Editor in Chief of AMAC Newsline. You can follow him on X @shaneharris513.
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