Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida kicked his rhetoric up a notch Wednesday as he insisted it is time for the United States to take dramatic action to stop the flow of fentanyl across the southern border.
“Bomb Sinaloa. Not kidding,” he tweeted.
Bomb Sinaloa. Not kidding. https://t.co/xQnAsPeQQE
— Matt Gaetz (@mattgaetz) September 21, 2022
Gaetz’ YouTube page included an extended video of his comments during a House Judiciary Committee hearing about sending an air strike on the Mexican drug cartels. He compared his proposal to the U.S. military response after the 9/11 attacks.
“I know all of us [recently] thought back to Sept. 11, 2001 … and you think about thousands of Americans needlessly dying, and then us going off into, like, 20 years of war in every Central Asian cave … and I think today about the tens of thousands of [American] lives that we are losing over and over again in every community in our country, and we seemingly clutch our pearls at the suggestion that we might think about dropping off a few Tomahawk missiles in the Sinaloa Mountains, where we know that that fentanyl is being manufactured,” Gaetz said in the video, which appeared under a headline reading, “Should America Drop Tomahawk Missiles on Cartel Mountains?”
Along with his terse comment, Gaetz posted a video clip of related comments he made in the House on Wednesday.
“There has been discussion today of fentanyl. And it irks me every time I hear someone talk about fentanyl overdoses, because no one overdoses on fentanyl, because I don’t think anybody really sets out to, like, score some fentanyl for a good time,” Gaetz said on Twitter.
Gaetz noted that demand from Americans ensures other parts of the drug war will never succeed.
Is Joe Biden responsible for the fentanyl crisis?
“I get why it’s hard to keep cocaine from coming into the country. People in the United States like using cocaine, they seek it out, they pay high dollar amounts for it. And so that would be something hard to stop. But since people don’t set out to use fentanyl, since it’s something we don’t want in our country, we should be totally capable of stopping it.”
Gaetz said the border is a sagging ruin because political leaders want it that way.
“[T]he only reason we aren’t is [that] we purposely allow our border to degrade, not by accident, not because of some lack of capability or some unsolvable problem set, but because there are some groups on the Right and Left who think that they will do better economically if we just let millions of people into the country and depress the wages of Americans,” he said.
“And the cost they’re willing to pay for that are the funerals and the deaths and the broken lives as a result of fentanyl poisoning. Because it is not an overdose. It is a poisoning that happens,” he said.
The concept of bombing Mexico to eliminate drug labs hit the news in May after former Defense Secretary Mark Esper wrote his tell-all book about his time in the Trump administration.
A report in The New York Times, citing the book, said that Esper claimed that more than once, Trump asked him during the summer of 2020 if the military could “shoot missiles into Mexico to destroy the drug labs.”
Esper quoted Trump as saying, “They don’t have control of their own country.”
Trump said that “we could just shoot some Patriot missiles and take out the labs, quietly,” adding that “no one would know it was us,” according to the Times’ excerpt.
The comments provoked the usual dust-up, leading Donald Trump Jr. to respond on Twitter.
I’m still trying to figure out the recent media outrage about my father possibly wanting to target Mexican drug cartel manufacturing facilities in Mexico… Is that supposed to be a bad thing???
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) May 6, 2022
“I’m still trying to figure out the recent media outrage about my father possibly wanting to target Mexican drug cartel manufacturing facilities in Mexico… Is that supposed to be a bad thing???” Donald Trump Jr. posted.
