The Stack: Trump’s Drone War on the Cartels

PoliticsCurrent Events
Written By Todd Huff
Symbolic image of drone over U.S.–Mexico border fence representing Trump’s anti-cartel strikes and fentanyl crisis response.

America’s deadly fentanyl crisis has pushed the border debate into new territory. President Trump’s decision to launch drone strikes on drug cartels operating in the Caribbean and near Venezuelan waters has ignited a fierce conversation about law, morality, and the limits of presidential authority. In today’s Stack, Todd walks through the numbers behind America’s overdose epidemic, explains the rationale behind

Trump’s “narco-terror” designation, and wrestles with whether these strikes fit within U.S. and international law. He also reflects on the deeper roots of addiction, sharing stories from his time leading a Boys & Girls Club and what real compassion looks like when truth meets broken lives. A thoughtful look at the complex battle for America’s soul—and safety.

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📝 Transcript: Trump’s Drone War on the Cartels

The Todd Huff Show – October 24, 2025

Host: Todd Huff

Todd Huff: Well, greetings, my friends. Welcome to today’s episode of The Todd Huff Show. It is my absolute pleasure and privilege to be here with you today. Let’s see, I’m going to get into some things today that—before the program, I was just sharing here behind the microphone—there are occasionally things that I talk about on here that I don’t feel 100% up to doing.

Todd Huff: And that’s because they mean a lot, and there’s a lot of details and information that I do my level best to stay on top of. But some things I’m still figuring out. When you pursue truth, I think what’s been revealed—what we’ve learned—about how to live this side of heaven as a culture, as a society, as a people, as a government, as a state, a country, whatever…

Todd Huff: You can have a firm handle on those things, and then there’s things that come up that are complex and difficult, and we’re going to talk about one of those today. One of those today would be what is happening with these drug cartels.

Todd Huff: I want to do my best with Trump basically striking these folks with drones and so forth. I want to go through this. I want to present this as fairly as possible. I want to explain the rationale for what Trump is doing and raise some questions that I think are fair—questions that all of us should ask, no matter who the President of the United States is.

Todd Huff: Also, time permitting, I did write about it yesterday in the newsletter—because I told you I would if I didn’t get to it—but I wrote in the newsletter yesterday. And if we have time today, on top of what’s happening with the cartels and Trump’s use of force here, I’ll also talk a little bit about his… well, the plans to move forward with this ballroom.

Todd Huff: In fact, there’s been progress made—demolition work to prepare the grounds for the new ballroom that Trump is pushing for here. That’s funded, by the way, not by taxpayer dollars but by donors and by Trump himself.

Todd Huff: So that’s where we’re headed today, my friends. Thank you for taking this journey alongside us.

Todd Huff: Also, I will tell you—I got home late last night. If you listened yesterday to the podcast, you’ll have heard me say that we went to the Pacers game last night—or we were going. Heck of a basketball game. Double overtime.

Todd Huff: You know, the Thunder played two games. Both of those games have gone to double overtime. The Pacers came out shorthanded last night, losing in double overtime to the reigning NBA champions. And the Pacers didn’t have—they didn’t play, I think, their top five what I would consider point guards were not on the court by the end of the game.

Todd Huff: So, anyway, it was a good time. Enjoyed it a lot, but I wish there was a different outcome.

Todd Huff: So that’s where we’re headed today, my friends—the cartels and so forth.

Todd Huff: Let me say one more thing before I get started here. If you haven’t visited FreedomMarketplace.net yet, I would ask you to do that. Part of the way we’re able to deliver this content to you free is by partnering with people who want to put their business in front of you.

Todd Huff (Sponsor Read): These are businesses who are aligned with you from an ideological perspective. They have services and products that some of you in this audience undoubtedly could benefit from. So that’s why we started Freedom Marketplace.

Todd Huff (Sponsor Read): FreedomMarketplace.net is where you can go. You can also go to ToddHuffShow.com/FreedomMarketplace — or you can just go to the website and find the main link there.

Todd Huff (Sponsor Read): Find out more information. See if you can support the folks who help bring this program to you on Freedom Marketplace.Liberty and business for all, my friends.

Todd Huff: All right, let’s talk about what’s going on here with Trump and the cartels—and these strikes that Trump is making against these cartels.

Todd Huff: And I think to understand the full scope of this, we’ve got to go back a little bit in time, and we have to understand the drug crisis in America.

Todd Huff: Now let me say this—we know that this is a problem that has existed in this country for some time. And we first seek to understand.

Todd Huff: I know there’s opinions—opinions happen immediately from some people. Some people, in fact, it’s the opposite of what we do here. You’ll probably never see me trying to break news—that’s not what we do here.

Todd Huff: We help people walk through the news and figure out how to best think about what’s going on—to have a conversation and a dialogue, to put it into the proper framework, and to try to understand it and wrestle with some of these difficult sides.

Todd Huff: Sometimes it’s very easy to understand and to know what the right side is. Other times it can be a bit complex—and this might be one of those times.

Todd Huff: And so it’s been said—and I’ve said this on this program before—one of the signs of being an adult is being able to entertain an idea without accepting it.

Todd Huff: I’ve noticed that many on the left can’t do this. There are some on the right who can’t either. Actually, many people of all walks of life are unwilling to do this.

Todd Huff: I don’t know if sometimes it forces people to be uncomfortable, to question some of their beliefs or their support of an individual person or party or politics or whatever.

Todd Huff: I think there are a lot of things that go into it. Sometimes it’s just that we live in a soundbite culture—but we really do try to dig deeper here to get to the truth.

Todd Huff: The core mission here at The Todd Huff Show is to help people hear and receive truth.

Todd Huff: Now—so we have to first understand the rationale for why we’re here.

Todd Huff: Overdose deaths in this country. Now, the data that I have in front of me is from 2022. I don’t know if that’s the most recent—that’s what I was able to find. Approximately 111,000 U.S. deaths in 2022 from drug overdoses, mostly from synthetic opioids.

Todd Huff: Synthetic opioid death rates have climbed—listen to this—from approximately 0.4 per 100,000 in 2002 to 22.7 per 100,000 in 2022.

Todd Huff: Now, I don’t have my calculator in front of me, but that’s approaching 50 times. I believe, Oz—Oz, I don’t know if you can do 22.7 divided by 0.4 and tell me what that number is—but that is a massive, massive rate of growth.

Oz (Producer): Fifty-six.

Todd Huff: Fifty-six! So, 56.7 times—75 times more—56 times more in 20 years. From 0.4 to 22.7 per 100,000 people dying of synthetic opioid overdoses.

Todd Huff: Now, that leads us to the fact that this is all connected.

Todd Huff: Now you think about the border—the war at the border, the open borders that we had under Biden, going back to Trump in 2015–2016, “Build that wall,” all that stuff.

Todd Huff: That meant a lot of things, but tucked into that argument was the illegal importation of some of these drugs that are undoubtedly killing citizens in this nation.

Todd Huff: Smuggling networks, cartels in Mexico and South America, of course, took advantage of U.S. southern border entry points and weaknesses.

Todd Huff: Trump’s taking care of that in a lot of ways—the border is largely secure. It’s not ever going to be 100% secure, but it’s very close. I mean, it’s 90-plus percent secure.

Todd Huff: Which, of course, proves that everything they had told us in the media and on the left during Biden’s entire presidency was not true—because Biden said he couldn’t do anything, he needed Congress to fix the problem. That problem has been fixed.

Todd Huff: And so Trump has gone from a defensive sort of position—where we’re securing our border—to now saying we’re going to proactively and offensively target these people, these groups, who are trying to import drugs like fentanyl that are incredibly deadly and dangerous and are killing Americans here at home.

Todd Huff: So there have been broader seizures of drugs by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. They say more fentanyl was seized in the last two years than in the previous five years combined.

Todd Huff: That makes sense, right? Because we’ve got a more secure border. It’s just tighter. They’re not able to get these things through like they once could.

Todd Huff: So they’re trying to adjust. The smugglers are trying to adjust the way they smuggle things into this country.

Todd Huff: The United States of America—for all the problems we have—is still, for all things, if you take legal and illegal markets out of the mind for a second, if you think about people who want to make a profitable living—again, legally or illegally—they would want to sell to the American people, because this is still the greatest economic engine on Earth.

Todd Huff: And so they’re trying to find ways to get this before the American people—to get them addicted to the products.

Todd Huff: Now, I’m not glossing over personal choices that exist here. But sometimes these are very complicated issues.

Todd Huff: If you’re raised in a house where your parents are doing drugs—some kids have a remarkable ability to see that and say, “I want nothing to do with that.” Others—heck, for all we know, others may have…

Todd Huff: Of course we know some of this is true: some babies are born with addictions to drugs because the mother during pregnancy is taking drugs.

Todd Huff: So there are all sorts of factors here. Obviously, human choice is a factor—but sometimes the environment in which we’re raised plays a role, too.

Todd Huff: I know when I started running a nonprofit organization—I ran a Boys & Girls Club for about three years—it was in my community.

Todd Huff: It was actually in the next community over from mine. I was in a small town. Well, the town that the Boys & Girls Club was in, many people would consider small—but my town was much smaller than that.

Todd Huff: It was my community, though. When I was a kid, when Mom said we were going “into town” to go to the grocery store or whatever, we would go to this town.

Todd Huff: And I was naive because I was raised by two just amazing people, and I lived a bit of a… I don’t know, just a blessed, idyllic childhood. Everything was good for me, and I didn’t understand how bad it was for some other kids.

Todd Huff: I had a mom who stayed home when I went to school. She was always involved in whatever was going on in the classroom — she was a homeroom mom or whatever they called them. She was involved in the PTA or PTO, whatever. She was just involved and cared about us, was home all the time. We just had constant access to my mother.

Todd Huff: My dad, of course, worked — but he would rearrange his working hours so that he could coach us. My dad was always the coach of our teams. It was just a blessing.

Todd Huff: I didn’t realize until I ran that Boys and Girls Club, and I was in my 20s, so you might think that that’s a little naive — maybe it was — but I remember, as a young guy running that club, just being blown away by some of the circumstances these kids had growing up that I never had to remotely deal with.

Todd Huff: I remember a couple of brothers once. We had a program that we called The Shuffle. And this will date when this happened — this was in the mid-2000s, like 2006 to 2009, in that vicinity.

Todd Huff: We had this program targeting teenagers. The reason we did this program was because local law enforcement said, “We’re getting a lot of calls in this community where we’re having to respond to youth who are having law enforcement contact because they’re doing things that require the police to be called. Is there something that can be done proactively?”

Todd Huff: There was a partnership formed with us, and we went into this community. I loved these kids. I had a great time. Played basketball with them, did a bunch of things. We had cookouts there. Got some of them to come from the club as well on other days of the week.

Todd Huff: But we would go one day a week and do The Shuffle. We’d have a drawing for an iPod Shuffle — that’ll date that, that’ll really date us. We had a grant to do this program, so we bought a few iPod Shuffles, and every time you attended, you’d get a ticket to put in, and we would draw, I don’t know, once a month or once a quarter.

Todd Huff: We did it at the beginning, but it didn’t continue long. But we did it at the beginning. And I remember both of the brothers had won an iPod Shuffle.

Todd Huff: Several months later, they were asking me, “Todd, when are we going to have another drawing for iPod Shuffles?”

Todd Huff: And I started to say, “Well, that was a grant. We don’t have funds to do that right now.” Whatever the answer was — and then I said, “Wait a minute. You both won one. Why do you want other ones for?”

Todd Huff: I was kind of teasing, having fun with them — and they looked at me and said, “Well, we had to sell our iPods in order to bail our mom out of jail.”

Todd Huff: And that was perhaps the biggest eye-opener for me. There were lots of them, but that one hit me hardest between the eyes. Because I had no idea that that was the level of problem they were dealing with.

Todd Huff: So some of these things run really deep — is my point. And it’s easy to point the finger and say, “It’s all your choices.” It certainly is. We’re responsible for ourselves.

Todd Huff: But man, it’s a lot easier having been raised the way that I was than the way some of these folks — maybe some of you — were raised. Not for comparative purposes, but just to understand it’s not always about personal choice alone.

Todd Huff: It is — I’m not minimizing that. I believe that’s critically important. But sometimes, before we fully understand things, we may have a lifestyle thrust upon us that causes us to have some really bad things in our lives, like these drugs.

Todd Huff: So that’s the deal. That’s kind of the backdrop to all this.

Todd Huff: Now, in August, President Trump ordered U.S. forces to strike suspected drug smuggling vessels in the Caribbean, near Venezuelan waters.

Todd Huff: And on September 2nd of this year, the first publicly acknowledged strike was a boat linked to Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, which of course you hear about here, right?

Todd Huff: This is all connected to border security — the intentions of those evildoers in that country. Of course, they’re all over the place. There are people born here who have really evil intentions. But this is one — these are not American citizens.

Todd Huff: They’re trying to smuggle their drugs and violence across the border — get it in, somehow figure out the weaknesses. And Trump has gone from saying “We’re going to protect our border” to “We’re going to begin to take this to you now.”

Todd Huff: He’s done this — and I’ll get more into this in the next segment. So let me give you the facts. But there’s rationale. He didn’t just wake up one morning and say, “Hey, strike these boats” or whatever.

Todd Huff: We’ll get into that, but I really want to give you the timeline here before we get out of this first segment.

Todd Huff: So, mid-September — about a month ago — there were additional strikes reported. And they began referring to Tren de Aragua and others doing these things as “narco-terrorists,” which is important.

Todd Huff: Then earlier this month, the administration told Congress that it is in a non-international armed conflict — N-I-A-C — with these drug cartels.

Todd Huff: Now, pause for a moment — because when I was first researching this, I thought, “What does ‘non-international’ mean?” It took me a minute.

Todd Huff: The reason that term is used is not because it means it’s not happening outside this country — it means it’s not between two nation-states.

Todd Huff: The cartels are not the Venezuelan or Mexican or whatever government. They have a lot of power — maybe even, to some degree, by proxy, controlling the government or at least heavily influencing it — but they’re not nations. So it’s not international.

Todd Huff: This is a different type of conflict. It’s between a nation and a group that’s been deemed or termed a terrorist organization.

Todd Huff: October 8th — just a couple of weeks ago — AP reports that Congress lacks hard public evidence that these vessels carried drugs. Questions have been asked about this.

Todd Huff: October 18th, just last week — Trump announces that the survivors from one of these strikes will be set for prosecution in Ecuador and Colombia.

Todd Huff: And then just a couple of days ago, on the 21st — just this week — Trump says it’s possible that there will be limited land operations to “eliminate narco-terrorist infrastructure.”

Todd Huff: So that’s kind of the background. Got through what I wanted to get through here in this first segment, my friends.

Todd Huff (Sponsor Read): You know, one of the biggest challenges for conservatives like us is finding ways to ensure our values align with what we do — including how we invest.

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Todd Huff: I have to take a timeout. Sit tight. Back here in just a minute.

Todd Huff: Welcome back, my friends. Would it surprise you—maybe it would, maybe it wouldn’t—would it surprise you that I don’t know entirely where I fall on this issue?

Todd Huff: This is not the first time something like this has happened, where there are questions regarding the president’s authority to use force. It won’t be the last. Congress has tried to deal with this; they’ve put certain mechanisms and things in place to try to create clear rules.

Todd Huff: But honestly, the more rules there are, the more loopholes exist, and sometimes it becomes maybe even more problematic or unclear as to where the actual goalposts are.

Todd Huff: It’s one of those things—who was the philosopher who said—I'm drawing a blank here—but one of them said: “Many laws, many lawbreakers.” Basically, if you want to make a law about everything, you’ll end up making everybody a lawbreaker.

Todd Huff: And there are different types of laws, right? There’s the moral law. So there are things that are against the law—illegal in this country or others—that violate the moral code. Those are laws you don’t have to even tell people to follow.

Todd Huff: For example: murder. You shouldn’t have to explain to someone that murder is wrong. That’s built in. That’s the divine moral code. While we may not understand every detail, we do understand the biggies—the Ten Commandment-type things.

Todd Huff: But the more laws you make that are administrative in purpose—that are not morally wrong, they’re just “this is the way the government does it, and if you do it a different way, you’re a criminal”—those are big problems. Because we don’t have any way of knowing it unless we’re experts in all the pages of law that exist out there.

Todd Huff: And so that’s a part of this. This is a country approaching its 250th birthday, which will happen next year with Trump in the White House—which is going to be epic, by the way.

Todd Huff: But you look at this, and you think: when it comes to rules and arbitrary guidelines, it becomes complicated. You’ve got a country that’s been dealing with these kinds of questions for a long time. You’ve got different congresses with different perspectives, the evolution of culture and society, presidents who push the envelope, and it becomes murky.

Todd Huff: And I’ll tell you—a big part of this, from my vantage point—is that Congress… Congress oftentimes doesn’t want to do the things it’s supposed to.

Todd Huff: You know what’s remarkable to me? They want to tell you that they can make equal pay for everybody on planet Earth for equal work. They want you to believe they can control the sea levels in five years. But they won’t do the things that are laid out in the Constitution.

Todd Huff: Congress a lot of times says, “We don’t want to do that; here, the president can do more of this or that.” And it becomes more chopped up and convoluted. Then you’ve got terrorist organizations, which is obviously different—different from fighting crime here in the country.

Todd Huff: When you’re engaging in a war—obviously, when you’re engaging the enemy, you don’t go up and give them their Miranda rights before you engage militarily. I mean, there are obvious differences. But then there are questions about where that line can be drawn.

Todd Huff: A lot of reasonable people can disagree. Congress—there are senators pushing for a vote on this. That includes Rand Paul, who I do respect, and Tim Kaine, and others on both sides.

Todd Huff: There are those with true constitutional concerns and those who simply oppose the president because they hate him. There’s international law to consider, too. Some say the administration hasn’t shown the proof necessary for each target to meet the criteria.

Todd Huff: And then there’s Trump, trying to prevent drugs from coming into this country and adding to the 111,000 people who die here from overdoses.

Todd Huff: So I wanted to paint that picture today. And you know what—it’s okay if you say, “You know what, I’m not sure where I fall on this.” I can see the concerns. What’s wrong with that?

Todd Huff: I can see the concerns from both sides. We don’t want a president doing things that aren’t permitted by law, but we also don’t want a president sitting on his hands when he could protect the American people, when he’s following the steps and the law as laid out.

Todd Huff: I think a case can be made either way. I think there are concerns on both sides. But I want to present it fairly today, my friends. I think I’ve done that—at least to the best of my abilities.

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Todd Huff: One more thing as we close, my friends. I talked about this on the Todd Talk today, but the short version is there are some things we’re changing to try to bring the message of truth to as many people as possible.

Todd Huff: One of those things we’re looking to do is have more guests. And so I’d like to know what you think. You can either email me—todd@toddhuffshow.com—or go to ToddHuffShow.com/guest and tell us who you think we should talk to.

Todd Huff: But I’ve got to go. SDG.

Todd Huff

Todd Huff is a popular talk show host and podcaster known for his intelligent and entertaining conservative discussions on The Todd Huff Show, which attracts 200,000 weekly listeners. He covers a variety of topics, including politics and culture, with a focus on authentic and meaningful dialogue. Outside of work, he enjoys traveling with his family, spending time outdoors, and coaching his kids' soccer team.

https://toddhuffshow.com
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