As part of touting Trump’s huge success in blocking fentanyl from crossing America’s southern border, Pam Bondi stated both (1) that the administration has seized fentanyl in quantities that are enough to kill almost 80% of Americans and (2) that all sorts of less toxic street drugs are laced with fentanyl, making them deadly. Leftists instantly seized upon how it sounded as if she said that Trump had saved 249 million people in 100 days.

That was to be expected. But the same attack came from Jonah Goldberg, a one-time conservative. Goldberg’s response illustrates the danger Trump faces from the “faux” right, which claims to be conservative but long ago abandoned those principles in favor of its overwhelming hatred for Donald Trump. For these NeverTrumpers, immured in their high-end D.C. and Manhattan neighborhoods, getting Trump is significantly more important than saving Americans from the joint depredations of China and Mexico.

Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that is 100 times more potent than morphine. It has legitimate medical uses, but even minute quantities can be deadly. In 2022, the last year for which there is full data, almost 74,000 Americans died from fentanyl overdoses. By contrast, in that same year, around 21,000 died from gun crime. The difference in risk to Americans is striking.

Almost none of this fentanyl is domestically manufactured. Instead, it’s manufactured in Mexico, using ingredients that come from China. Some might call this an act of war. After all, what we’re seeing is America’s primary geopolitical opponent deliberately taking steps that it knows will kill tens of thousands of Americans annually. And of course, it’s not just the dead. Countless tens of thousands more lives are destroyed through addictions, whether directly or indirectly (e.g., children with addicted parents or communities ravaged by fentanyl addiction):

Fentanyl problems aren’t limited to completely dysfunctional addicts in broken communities. Instead, the news is rife with stories of ordinary Americans dying from taking what they thought were non-lethal illicit drugs.

In February, four people in Lake Tahoe died from fentanyl-laced cocaine. The dealer was spared first-degree murder charges because even he didn’t realize what he was selling, and he had tried to save his customers from death. Meanwhile, American teenagers are dying regularly because they buy counterfeit prescription pills for “safe” highs, only to ingest deadly amounts of fentanyl.

It's not a coincidence that so much of the drug smuggling news is from 2022, which was when Joe Biden’s open border was at full flow. When you have the Border Patrol dealing with 10,000-12,000 illegal aliens daily, screening them for being drug mules is difficult. Add in the fact that the cartels control large parts of the border on the Mexico side and, until recently, were conducting illegal immigration on a mass scale, and you can see where it becomes impossible to stop the drug flow.

Trump, though, quickly controlled the border. Suddenly, we went from 15,000 illegal entries per day to 178. When you control the border, you capture illicit drugs and cut off future attempts at smuggling them in. It was this success that Pam Bondi has boasted about:

For anyone paying attention over the last few years, while Bondi spoke inartfully, conflating a few points, it was clear what she was trying to say. Regarding the lives saved, it’s routine when state or federal governments seize fentanyl shipments for them to explain the horrors it prevented by saying that “it was enough fentanyl to kill X million Americans.” (See, e.g., here and here.) And indeed, it’s a legitimate terrorism threat that these vast amounts of fentanyl could be aerosolized or introduced into water supplies.

Bondi, quite obviously, was also speaking about all those illicit drugs that are laced with fentanyl (see above), elevating them from merely stupid and self-destructive to completely deadly.

But of course, that’s not how the Trump haters chose to interpret it. As Rolling Stone states, “Pam Bondi Flatters Trump With Claim That 75% of America Would Be Dead if Not For Him.”

That’s what one expects from leftists.

But where the real damage comes from is from those who portray themselves as righteous conservatives. Exhibit A is Jonah Goldberg, once one of the wittiest members of the conservative cocktail party circuit during the Bush II and Obama administrations.

His columns were always a delight, but Trump broke him. Now, he is someone who claims to be conservative but will always embrace a leftist cause if it means “getting Trump.” He’s Groucho Marx, without the humor, and with more destructive intent.

And so it was that Goldberg ignored Bondi’s obvious meaning and went for the disingenuous snark:

Since the phrase Fifth Columnist originated during the 1930s Spanish Civil War, we’ve understood that the deadliest enemy often isn’t necessarily the open one, arrayed against on the battlefield. Instead, it’s that fifth column, working from within to undermine a movement. The RINOs and NeverTrumpers are America’s Fifth Columnists, parading around in the uniform of conservatism, but doing their best, through snark, disinformation, and deliberate stupidity, to elevate the Democrats to permanent power.

Image: X screen grab.