Donald Trump has privately expressed interest in the idea of quietly sending special-ops units south of the border to assassinate the top brass of Mexico’s worst drug cartels, according to a new report in Rolling Stone. Sources who have discussed the matter with him told the magazine that the former president has claimed that the U.S. military has “tougher killers than they do” and wondered aloud why no one’s thought to send assassins into Mexico before him. (They have, according to Rolling Stone, with little success.) The presumptive Republican presidential nominee has floated more brute-force tactics in the fight against the cartels for years, with The New York Times reporting last year that he first began talking to aides about firing missiles into Mexico in 2020. Trump has been open about pushing for a military intervention, saying in a video he released in January that, if elected again, he plans to “order the Department of Defense to make appropriate use of special forces, cyber-warfare, and other overt and covert actions to inflict maximum damage on cartel leadership, infrastructure and operations.”
