When a resurfaced clip of Joe Biden’s 1989 speech went viral in December 2025, it created an awkward moment for Democrats attacking President Donald Trump’s military campaign against alleged drug boats. In that speech, delivered as the official Democratic Party response to President George H.W. Bush’s address on the crack cocaine epidemic, then-Senator Biden declared with unmistakable clarity what he wanted the United States to do.
“Let’s go after the drug lords where they live with an international strike force,” Biden said. “There must be no safe haven for these narco-terrorists and they must know it.”
Biden did not stop there. He called for “another D-Day” against the cartels, not “another Vietnam, not another limited war fought on the cheap and destined for stalemate and human tragedy.” He characterized the drug threat in explicitly military terms. “America is under attack, literally under attack by an enemy who is well financed, well supplied and well armed and fully capable of declaring total war against a nation and its people.”
That 1989 rhetoric now reads like a blueprint for exactly what the Trump administration has done since September 2025, when U.S. forces began destroying vessels that the Pentagon claims are operated by cartel-linked organizations—starting in the Caribbean off Venezuela and expanding to the eastern Pacific in October. The death toll has surpassed two hundred people. Democrats have called the strikes illegal and potentially war crimes, with some demanding a Justice Department investigation into a September strike that killed survivors of an initial attack. Yet the legal and institutional foundations enabling the campaign trace directly to the Biden administration itself.
The Biden White House built a counter narcotics architecture that stopped short of military lethality but established key frameworks that Trump later escalated into kinetic operations. In December 2021, Biden signed two executive orders creating a framework to disrupt cartels through financial and intelligence tools. One established the U.S. Council on Transnational Organized Crime. The other imposed sanctions on foreign persons involved in the global illicit drug trade. Biden’s 2022 National Drug Control Strategy explicitly targeted “transnational criminal organizations” and called for obstructing their financial activities.
The most consequential Biden-era action may have been the July 2024 Treasury Department designation of Tren de Aragua as a Transnational Criminal Organization. That Venezuelan gang became the central justification for Trump’s first strike on September 2, 2025. Trump’s February 2025 Foreign Terrorist Organization designation explicitly built on this prior TCO designation.
The New York Times revealed in February 2025 that covert CIA surveillance drone flights over Mexico hunting fentanyl labs “began under the Biden administration.” A senior U.S. official told Fox News the Biden-authorized MQ-9 Reapers were “not armed” and “not lethal,” conducted “in partnership with the Mexican government.” Trump expanded the program and reportedly added lethal options.
Under Biden, the U.S. Coast Guard set a record in 2024 for cocaine seizures, hauling 225 metric tons of the drug in the final year of Biden’s term. The Trump administration inherited and then militarized this aggressive maritime counter-narcotics posture.
The critical legal precedents also accumulated under Democratic presidents. Biden invoked Article II authority for repeated strikes on Yemen’s Houthis beginning January 2024 without congressional authorization. Obama-era Office of Legal Counsel opinions on Libya and ISIS established that the president can use force below the threshold of “war” without seeking approval from Congress. These theories now undergird the classified DOJ opinion that the Trump administration cites as justification for declaring the United States is engaged in a “non-international armed conflict” with the cartels.
Gabor Rona of Lawfare captured the dynamic precisely in an October 2025 piece titled “Venezuelan Boat Attacks: Utterly Unprecedented and Patently Predictable.” He wrote that “the legal abuses of the Bush, Obama, and Biden administrations form a foundation upon which the Trump policy is built.”
The decisive threshold Biden refused to cross was Foreign Terrorist Organization designation for Mexican drug cartels. In early 2023, Republican attorneys general from twenty-one states formally demanded Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken make such a designation. Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody specifically argued Biden’s immigration policies “emboldened the cartels.” Biden declined.
Trump signed an executive order directing the State Department to designate cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations on January 20, 2025, his first day in office. By February 20, Secretary of State Marco Rubio had designated eight cartels including the Sinaloa Cartel and CJNG as FTOs. The Baker Institute noted that FTO designated groups are legally treated as “enemy combatants who can legally be killed—the same as if the FTO nominee were wearing a uniform of an enemy military force.
The killing began September 2, 2025. A Navy strike destroyed a vessel between Sucre, Venezuela and Trinidad, killing eleven people President Trump identified as Tren de Aragua. CNN later reported that survivors of the initial strike were killed in a follow up strike, leading to bipartisan congressional concern and accusations of a potential war crime. Multiple Democratic senators including Nevada’s Jacky Rosen described the double tap as precisely that.
Operations expanded to the eastern Pacific in October 2025, which became the deadliest single month with forty-five people killed. By late May 2026, over two hundred people had been killed in more than sixty boat strikes across the Caribbean and eastern Pacific.
The AP has reported that the military has presented no public evidence that any struck vessel was actually carrying drugs. The fentanyl responsible for U.S. overdose deaths is smuggled primarily over land from Mexico, not by boat from Venezuela, raising questions about the operation’s strategic logic. In January 2026, families of two Trinidadian nationals killed in an October strike filed a lawsuit calling the campaign a war crime and “unprecedented and manifestly unlawful.”
Senate Democrats attempted to force a War Powers Resolution vote to block the escalated strikes in October 2025. Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky notably joined Democrats in the effort. The Republican controlled Senate rejected both resolutions.
The Pentagon’s new inspector general froze a proposal to evaluate military targeting in the strikes after taking office, saying he wanted to consult department leadership before any review.
Georgetown’s Michael Shifter offered a sharp assessment of such actions:
“The Trump Administration’s policy of destroying fishing boats allegedly carrying drugs and killing people without due process or providing any evidence constitutes a radical departure from the U.S.’s traditional approach…In all significant respects, what is happening today is unprecedented.”
Yet the unprecedented and the predictable coexist. Joe Biden built sanctions, intelligence, and legal theory infrastructure on which Trump escalated. Biden’s own 1989 rhetoric calling for an “international strike force” and a “D-Day” against narco terrorists provides a striking historical irony. The rhetorical foundation for aggressive cartel warfare was built by Democrats decades ago, even as Biden’s actual presidency took non-militarized approach that his successor abandoned entirely.
The chain of causation runs clearly. Biden built the institutional counter narcotics framework and set maritime interdiction records through the Coast Guard. Republicans pressed for FTO designations that Biden refused. Trump signed FTO designations on Day 1. Trump’s DOJ issued a classified opinion declaring the U.S. is in an armed conflict with the cartels. Military strikes began September 2, 2025. The body count now exceeds two hundred.
At the end of the day, the uniparty does not disagree about whether to fight endless wars abroad but only about which enemies deserve the bombs and which bureaucratic frameworks should authorize the killing.
