‘Red’ America needs the truth on Trump’s fentanyl failures
With some voters seeing the light, it's time to focus on an issue that hits home
For at least some voters who elected Donald Trump in 2024, remorse is setting in. They wanted to see problems solved, not new ones created. They weren’t expecting the “Trump-storm” I described recently -- the chaotic upheaval of our entire federal government, including services they count on.
Fed-up Trump voters in Michigan, interviewed by a group called Engagious, discussed affordability, Elon Musk, tariffs, and more. But there's another issue getting less attention in the media that those who supported Trump should hear about: fentanyl.
For my podcast They Stand Corrected, which fact-checks the news, I dug into the facts about the fentanyl crisis. Trump’s lies and record of failure threaten to undo progress made under Biden.
For millions of Americans, this issue hits home. As Bloomberg reported last year, “8 in 10 swing-state voters say that fentanyl misuse was a ‘very important’ or ‘somewhat important’ issue when deciding who to vote for in November — more than the number who cited abortion, climate change, labor and unions, or the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.”
These voters were also “most likely to hold drug users and Mexican cartels responsible for the epidemic.” It has been a winning issue for Trump, which explains why he talks about it so much. In a recent Cabinet meeting, he repeated one of his favorite falsehoods about it: “We lose 300,000 people a year to fentanyl.”
The numbers available are nowhere near that high. In December, the Drug Enforcement Agency reported, “More than 107,000 people lost their lives to a drug overdose in 2023, with nearly 70 percent of those deaths attributed to opioids such as fentanyl.” But these numbers aren’t the point. The big question is whether Trump has any clue how to handle it.
Americans need facts. Yes, many are so caught up in ideologies and big lies that they can’t be reached. But my experience with They Stand Corrected has shown me that there are people across the political spectrum who genuinely want the truth. They’ve learned not to trust the mainstream media, and they don’t know where to turn.
So, if you have loved ones who believe Trump has the answers on fentanyl, I encourage you to forward this. Here’s a message from me:
You have every right to be deeply concerned about the hell that opioids are wreaking on your families and communities. And you have every right to have given up on major news organizations that regularly fail in their mission. But staunchly right-wing media are not telling you the truth either -- including on this.
First, fentanyl deaths went up under Trump’s first term. An especially detailed chart here shows that after he took over, drug overdose deaths increased, then leveled off, then shot upward in 2020 during Covid. Biden inherited this. By 2022, the United States managed to stabilize the numbers. Then came the big news: a major drop.
This is what the latest figures show (which, amazingly, Trump did not manage to get the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to hide). New provisional data predicts “a nearly 24% decline in drug overdose deaths in the United States for the 12 months ending in September 2024, compared to the previous year,” the CDC announced in February.
"It is unprecedented to see predicted overdose deaths drop by more than 27,000 over a single year," Allison Arwady, director of the CDC's National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, said.
If cartels have brought in their products through an allegedly “open border,” how could that be? It’s time for a reality check. “The vast majority of fentanyl is seized at ports of entry, not between the ports where people cross illegally,” the libertarian Cato Institute points out. U.S. citizens comprise 80% of people caught with fentanyl at ports of entry and 80% of convicted fentanyl traffickers in border states. (The rest are a mix of legal residents and people here illegally.)
The crisis is about supply and demand. If Trump were the genius businessman he claims to be, he would be working to cut back on demand through things like addiction treatments, mental health support, scientific research, education programs warning people against drugs that can be laced with fentanyl, and more.
Instead, he constantly brings it up in the context of immigration -- just as he does with sex trafficking in the United States, another scourge driven overwhelmingly by U.S. citizens. If people fighting fentanyl follow Trump’s lead and think this is mostly an “open border” issue, they won’t make much progress.
Trump is the president, and we can all hope for the best. All good people want fentanyl tragedies to stop. But solving anything requires us to put facts first -- something this president never does.
Josh Levs is host of They Stand Corrected, the podcast and newsletter fact-checking the media. Find him at joshlevs.com.
Thanks for publishing this, The Contrarian. THIS is an example of a story that hits home for so many Americans -- including many in "deep red" areas steeped in Republican politics. More facts and details: https://theystandcorrected.substack.com/p/immigration-lies-drugs-and-sex-trafficking
Let's talk about Tulsi Gabbard's hand in this issue; she has no problem lying to Congress on the record:
During a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing Tuesday, Gabbard presented the Annual Threat Assessment, or ATA, about the dangers state and nonstate actors pose to the United States. In her opening statement, Gabbard emphasized the presence of foreign cartels and illicit drug trafficking as the most dire threat to national security—but notably didn’t mention Canada at all.
Canada’s absence in the report presents a stark contradiction to the Trump administration’s insistence that drug trafficking across the northern border presents a major threat to Americans. Trump has cited this excuse as part of his rationale for levying 25 percent tariffs on Canadian exports.
Senator Martin Heinrich asked Gabbard to explain why she hadn’t mentioned Canada in her report.
“Is the [Intelligence Community] wrong in its omission of Canada as a source of illicit fentanyl in the ATA? I was surprised, given some of the rhetoric, that there is no mention of Canada in the ATA,” the New Mexico Democrat pressed.
“Senator, the focus in my opening and the ATA was really to focus on the most extreme threats in that area. And our assessment is that the most extreme threat related to fentanyl continues to come from and through Mexico,” Gabbard replied.
“So, the president has stated that the fentanyl coming through Canada is massive, and actually said it was an “unusual and extraordinary threat,” and that was the language that was used to justify putting tariffs on Canada,” Heinrich said. “I’m just trying to reconcile those two issues. Is it an “unusual and extraordinary threat,” or is it a minor threat that doesn’t even merit mention in the Annual Threat Assessment?”
Gabbard said she couldn’t speak to the “specifics” of the threat posed by Canadian fentanyl trafficking.
https://newrepublic.com/post/193148/donald-trump-tulsi-gabbard-canada-fentanyl