In a recent essay for The Grayzone, Christian Parenti wrote that Donald Trump's greatest affront to the establishment was opposing foreign interventionism and ending "forever wars". Nothing could be further from the truth.
Since last fall, a formal proposal from a clique of former Trump administration officials at the Center for Renewing America (CRA) for using military force against Mexican criminal organizations has been gathering support from the Republican mainstream.
The president of the CRA is Trump's former Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director Russ Vought, who recently argued the merits of theocratic nationalism in an essay for Newsweek. Other Trump administration officials at the CRA include former shadow Secretary of Defense Kash Patel, former OMB general counsel Mark Paoletta, and former acting Deputy Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Ken Cuccinelli.
As former Trump Attorney General William Barr called for in an editorial for the Wall Street Journal, the CRA proposal also recommends a formal statutory designation of cartels as "something distinct from but akin to" foreign terrorist organizations.
The proposal was advanced in the form of a bill at the beginning of the legislative session in January by Congressman Dan Crenshaw (R-TX), who introduced the AUMF Cartel Influence Resolution that would authorize the President "to use all necessary and appropriate force against those foreign nations, foreign organizations, or foreign persons affiliated with foreign organizations" trafficking fentanyl or using violence and intimidation for establishing territorial control for illicit activities.
The bill has garnered support from 19 Republican co-sponsors including Congressman Tony Gonzalez (R-TX), who introduced a bill in 2021 calling for designating cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, and far-right QAnon conspiracy theorist Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA).
In comments on Twitter, Taylor Greene has suggested that the AUMF Cartel Influence Resolution would "use every tool available from increased criminal penalties, bypassing Democrat District Attorneys and prosecutors who refuse to apply existing federal laws and even denaturalization" or the revocation of citizenship.
The proposal for unilaterally using military force against the United States's top trading partner and neighbor with whom it shares a 1,954-mile land border is the logical next step for the proto-fascist movement that has taken over the Republican party since the election of Donald Trump in 2016. By transmuting the ideology of resentment, redemptive violence, national humiliation and revenge into an actual kinetic war against immigrants, drug dealers, drug consumers and the homeless internally and drug and human smuggling networks in Mexico, the movement hopes to turn MAGA's populist grievance politics into a national identity that projects military force outward in the name of combatting the unstoppable flow of illegal drugs to the world's largest consumer of them and repressive militarized policing inward in a purifying, cathartic national rebirth.
