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Forget MAGA. It’s time for MACA: Make America Coked-up Again [1]
['Daily Kos Staff']
Date: 2025-09-18
For all of President Donald Trump’s bellicose rhetoric about stepping up the war on drugs, it turns out that what he is really giving America is … much lower prices on cocaine.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Trump’s crackdown on fentanyl suppliers left an open path for a cocaine kingpin to step in, making coke cheaper and as pure as ever. So while Trump may have disrupted the Sinaloa cartel, Mexico’s largest fentanyl trafficker, Nemesio “Mencho” Oseguera, has stepped in to fill the void. Now, cocaine prices have fallen by nearly half compared to five years ago, with a gram now costing around $60 to $75.
Well, Trump did say he’d end inflation on Day One. He didn’t specify what inflation, exactly. Perhaps Trump’s war on drugs was just a war on drug prices? So much for Trump’s 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico as payback for fentanyl.
This probably isn’t what conservatives mean by RETVRN, their demand that we reject modernity and embrace tradition, but Trump is definitely taking us back to the 1980s, which is when, coincidentally, Trump was vouching for a big-time cocaine trafficker to get him a lighter sentence.
In 1985, Joseph Weichselbaum was indicted for heading a huge cocaine operation, but he also happened to run the helicopter service Trump used to bring people to his Atlantic City casinos to the tune of $2 million per year. Trump wrote to the judge, calling Weichselbaum a “credit to the community” and “conscientious, forthright, and diligent.”
In this courtroom drawing, Ross Ulbricht, right, appears in federal court in New York for sentencing, on May 29, 2015. Ulbricht was sentenced to life in prison by a judge who cited six deaths from drugs bought on his site and five people he tried to have killed.
While lower-ranking members of the drug ring were slapped with 20-year sentences, Trump’s conscientious and forthright pal only served 18 months. Did we mention that while he was awaiting sentencing, Weichselbaum lived in Trump Plaza in an apartment owned by Trump himself? And that he moved to Trump Tower after he was released?
Trump’s commitment to the war on drugs remains … flexible when needed. He’s pardoned high-level kingpins like Ross Ulbricht, who created Silk Road, a dark website used extensively by drug traffickers. Sure, Ulbricht tried to solicit six murders-for-hire to protect his site, but oh well.
But while Trump is showering tender loving pardons and clemency to people at the top of drug trafficking operations, his feelings about the ostensible smaller players are quite different. There, he’s so jazzed to hurt people that he has taken to committing war crimes by bombing random Venezuelan boats, insisting they are filled with dangerous narco-terrorists bringing drugs to America’s shores. One tiny problem? Fentanyl is mostly produced in Mexico, and cocaine largely comes via the Pacific Ocean. So, blowing up boats in the Caribbean isn’t going to make a dent in either of those.
It’s such a wildly illegal move that John Yoo—yes, the John Yoo who was a former Justice Department official for the George W. Bush administration and wrote the memos justifying our torture of captured combatants during the War on Terror—thinks Trump has gone too far. “There has to be a line between crime and war. We can’t just consider anything that harms the country to be a matter for the military. Because that could potentially include every crime.”
John Yoo
Besides letting a new drug kingpin rise to the top and getting us all Al Pacino in “Scarface” levels of cocaine again, Trump’s immigration crackdown is also helping ensure the freer flow of drugs into the country.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump has reassigned federal border agents usually tasked with staffing Arizona checkpoints along a major fentanyl trafficking route from Mexico, leaving those checkpoints without any staff. Instead, they are processing migrants detained in Trump’s immigration crackdown.
And it isn’t just border personnel being shoved into the gaping, endless maw of Trump’s war on immigrants. Postal inspectors, who play a significant role in drug interdiction, were reassigned to the Department of Homeland Security to be part of an immigration task force. When Trump federalized the California National Guard during his occupation of Los Angeles, he diverted 32% of CalGuard members who normally worked on the state’s Counterdrug Task Force.
Trump’s literal bomb first, ask questions later approach is not really proving successful in the war on drugs. However, it is super successful if you were hoping for a return to the 1980s cocaine heyday, so you can thank Trump for the fact that an 8 ball will now cost a lot less.
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