When announcing an aggressive policy, US President Donald Trump often offers some grotesque justification, a meaningless fiction that should stick in our minds as a motivation for violence. The more we swallow these lies now, the harder it will be for us to question future falsehoods, because that would challenge our view of ourselves as intelligent beings.
This is the magic of the Big Lie, as Hitler explained My field: Tells a lie so absurd that people simply can’t believe it’s false. Hitler’s greatest lie was that the cause of Germany’s woes was an international Jewish conspiracy, a scapegoat who could be blamed for any problem and absolve others of all responsibility. In 1939, Hitler and his propagandists also spread blatant falsehoods about Poland – that it did not really exist as a state – and also that it was the aggressor who had started World War II.
Trump’s big lies are almost countless. Perhaps most versatile is that its policy focuses on curbing the illicit trade of fentanyl. Early in his second term, Trump said Canada attacked the United States first by allowing fentanyl to freely cross the border. And really, shouldn’t it become the 51st state of the United States?
This complaint was a pretext to impose tariffs on Canadian exports. But when Trump puts Canada and Mexico in the same bag and claims that fentanyl “flows” across the borders of both countries, he is lying. In 2024, only about 0.2% of fentanyl seized by U.S. border authorities came from Canada, a figure that wasn’t even mentioned in the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s 2024 National Drug Threat Assessment.
But in recent months, the Trump administration has dreamed up an even more sinister geopolitical fantasy: Military strikes against small boats in international waters are necessary to deter drug trafficking. These attacks, which many experts consider clearly illegal, have been concentrated off the coast of Venezuela and have so far killed at least 61 people. While it is widely acknowledged that these attacks will not stop the flow of fentanyl into the United States, Trump has stated that his administration will continue to “kill those who bring drugs into our country.”
The extrajudicial killing of suspected drug traffickers has less to do with drug trafficking and more to do with power projection – and perhaps even regime change. Although videos of the attacks have gone viral on social networks, there is no evidence that the victims were drug traffickers. In fact, Vice President J.D. Vance joked in September about killing innocent fishermen, saying he “wouldn’t go fishing in that part of the world right now.”
Additionally, the Trump administration has reportedly authorized covert CIA operations in Venezuela and deployed its most advanced aircraft carrier to the Caribbean Sea. This demonstration of military power is intended to be a political spectacle. The danger is that it could degenerate into an unwinnable and endless conflict.
The tragedy is that the opioid crisis has been an essential element of the American experience for the last quarter century. The United States has the highest opioid death rate in the world, due in large part to a for-profit “health care” system that steers people onto painkillers but fails to incentivize the long-term, intensive care needed to cure addiction.
The crisis was triggered by a profitable strategy by Purdue Pharma, the American pharmaceutical company that aggressively developed and marketed the popular opioid painkiller OxyContin. Although OxyContin was responsible for the initial increase in overdose deaths, many users turned to heroin and now fentanyl — about 50 times more potent than heroin — when they could no longer get prescriptions for Purdue Pharma’s best-selling product.
Americans living in the epicenters of the addiction crisis tend to vote Republican; Without their support, Trump would never have been elected. Trump and Vance are familiar with the opioid epidemic, as they see the source of suffering as a political asset that can be used against the enemy of their choosing – be it an ally like Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney or an adversary like Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
In his 2016 memoirs, Mountain elegyVance recounts how his mother, a nurse with easy access to prescription drugs, was addicted to drugs. However, his political discourse on immigration and security has created a different narrative, in which Vance blames other countries – “the poison crossing our borders” – for his mother’s problems. It follows that Americans must view their addiction as an external attack.
It is important to understand the psychology that Trump and Vance are exploiting. Drug addicts tend to blame others for their condition. The rise of the far right in American politics has elevated this mentality to the status of a national platform. The belief that someone else must be responsible for the country’s problems has come to influence foreign policy, and the Trump administration has invented increasingly absurd stories, such as that every attack on a Venezuelan ship saves 25,000 American lives.
Lies work because they deflect blame. Blaming other countries for the opioid crisis is an attractive form of moral outsourcing for Americans. But a fiction of this magnitude requires an entire alternate reality to be built around it. Trump and his administration are indoctrinating the American press and public to associate attacks on ships with stopping the flow of fentanyl and other drugs, a clear example of the falsehoods imperialists tell before launching doomed wars.
Wars begin with words, which means they must be taken seriously before a conflict breaks out. Only by exposing the big liars and telling the little truths can we have any hope of stopping Trump’s increasingly aggressive presidency.
