Outside the Beltway

In Writing Headline, NYT Shows its Inadequacy for this Moment

Steven L. Taylor · Sunday, November 30, 2025 · 8 comments

As per the screencap above, the NYT provides the following “news analysis”: In Announcing Pardon of Drug Trafficker While Threatening Venezuela, Trump Displays Contradictions.

President Trump and his top aides have said that drug cartels present one of the most pressing dangers to the United States, and have promised to eradicate them from the Western Hemisphere.

[…]

Less than 24 hours earlier, Mr. Trump had announced on social media that he was granting a full pardon to Juan Orlando Hernández, a former president of Honduras who had been convicted in the United States of drug trafficking charges in what was seen as a major victory for authorities in a case against a former head of state. That pardon has not yet been officially granted.

The two posts displayed a remarkable dissonance in the president’s strategy, as he moved to escalate a military campaign against drug trafficking while ordering the release of a man prosecutors said had taken “cocaine-fueled bribes” from cartels and “protected their drugs with the full power and strength of the state — military, police and justice system.” In fact, prosecutors said that Mr. Hernández, for years, allowed bricks of cocaine from Venezuela to flow through Honduras en route to the United States.

These statements show more than “contradictions” or “dissonance,” they show incoherence. Moreover (and this part is wildly consistent), both show an utter disregard for the rule of law. Vaporizing boats in the Caribbean because they might be drug dealers is essentially murder as “law enforcement” in a way that utterly disregards any due process or even the fig leaf of some kind of public evidence apart from “trust us.”

Pardoning Hernandez is simply letting off a person convicted of substantial involvement in the drug trade because Trump likes a specific political faction in Honduras/he has an affinity for powerful men (even, it would seem, those who have more or less forfeited their power).

Originally, I was going to quip that the above is like a headline that reads, ‘In Having a Hamburger While Having Human Remains in the Fridge, Jeffrey Dahmer Displays Contradictions,” except that contrasts a normal thing with an awful thing. Really, the above is more “In Having a Living Victim’s Amputated Leg As a Meal While Later Having a Murdered Victim’s Spleen for a Snack, Jeffrey Dahmer Displays Contradictions.”

Back to Trump: none of this is about “contradictions.” It is about an incoherent set of “policies” that highlight an action-movie understanding of drug interdiction and a man who loves exercising unilateral power, something that the pardon power allows him to do more than any other at his disposal. There are no contradictions here. This is who we have as a president, and the NYT is doing its readers a disservice to frame it as some complexity when it simply isn’t.

A better headline would have read: “Trump Demonstrates Lack of Seriousness About Drug Trade in Pardon Action While Ignoring the Rule of Law in Blowing Up Alleged Drug Boats.”

That is a bit unwieldy, I will admit, but it is a far more accurate headline than the one the Times provided. Feel free to share your own version below.