On December 15, 2025, Donald Trump issued the latest in a series of unprecedented executive orders, designating the narcotic drug fentanyl—used daily as an anesthetic in hospitals throughout the United States and the world—“a weapon of mass destruction” (WMD).

This designation is a true innovation. Fentanyl has never before been defined as any kind of weapon by any government anywhere, let alone a weapon of mass destruction. Until this order, fentanyl has been regulated internationally and domestically as a controlled narcotic drug, governed by public health, criminal law, and pharmaceutical safety regimes—not by the legal architecture developed to address chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear weapons.

Fentanyl as the New Terrorist WMD

The Trump executive order asserts that fentanyl’s lethality renders it a “chemical weapon,” and links it—without specifying any evidence—to assassinations, terrorist acts, insurgencies, and the potential for use by America’s adversaries in concentrated, large-scale terror attacks, implicitly invoking the logic of September 11. These assertions are presented as justification for elevating fentanyl from a public health and law-enforcement challenge into a top-tier national-security threat.

Notably, the order cites no evidence that the two unnamed cartels it references—almost certainly the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, both Mexican criminal organizations—have engaged in, or are planning, acts of terrorism, assassination, or mass-casualty attacks against the United States using fentanyl. Nor does it acknowledge that these groups pose a far greater violent threat to Mexico than to the United States. In reality, fentanyl has not been deployed as a weapon of terror. It has been trafficked for profit, consumed individually, and rendered lethal through misuse and adulteration—not through organized attacks designed to produce mass casualties or public spectacle.

Indeed, the only mass-casualty incident involving a fentanyl-related compound occurred in October 2002, when the Russian government pumped an aerosolized opiate into the Moscow Dubrovka Theater in an effort to incapacitate Chechen hostage takers, killing at least 130 hostages in the process. Even then, the act was never characterized as the use of a weapon of mass destruction.

That distinction matters. Terrorism, chemical warfare, and weapons of mass destruction are defined not only by lethality, but by intent and mode of use. Chemical weapons regimes were built to prohibit substances designed, produced, and deployed for the purpose of inflicting indiscriminate mass harm. Fentanyl’s legitimate medical uses, its regulation under narcotics law, and the absence of evidence of state-directed or cartel-directed weaponization all place it squarely outside that category.

Yet by declaring fentanyl a WMD, President Trump instantaneously transforms what has long been treated as a law-enforcement and public-health problem into an existential national-security threat.

Military–Civilian Fusion

This rhetorical transformation has sweeping consequences. It recasts drug trafficking as a matter not merely for criminal investigation and prosecution, but for sanctions, intelligence operations, homeland security measures, and military support. The order directs the Department of Homeland Security and the newly rebranded Department of War to “support the full spectrum of counter-fentanyl measures,” without defining the limits of that spectrum.

In principle, that ambiguity opens the door to actions that extend far beyond traditional counternarcotics policy: the use of U.S. military assets in foreign operations; the portrayal of migrants as vectors or enablers of WMD threats; the expansion of detention and removal authorities; and the characterization of opposition to administration policy as interference with national security. Military and civilian authorities are thus integrated as two arms of a single campaign—the federal state mobilized against perceived enemies abroad and at home.

The blending of law enforcement with the military has been a defining feature of the first year of Trump’s second term. This fusion operates in two directions: outward, toward foreign targets, and inward, toward domestic governance.

Outwardly, the administration’s framework transforms transnational criminal activity into narco-terrorism and frames drug trafficking as WMD proliferation. Overdose deaths are recast as acts of war against the United States. It thereby supplies a rationale for military force under the banner of national self-defense. Maritime seizures become counter-proliferation operations; blockades become defensive measures; and kinetic military action that kills criminal suspects overseas can be justified as both just and necessary. Regime change—once disfavored and sharply criticized by Trump in the context of Iraq and Afghanistan—re-emerges as a means of defending the American homeland.

That abstraction now has a concrete target.

Given its timing, this new WMD framework also appears designed to support the Trump administration’s military ramp-up against Venezuela, including lethal strikes on Venezuelan-linked vessels and explicit threats to extend those attacks onshore.

The most significant source of illicit fentanyl affecting the United States remains Mexico-based production networks using chemical precursors and equipment sourced largely from China, as documented by the Drug Enforcement Administration and Treasury. But the administration has sought to fold what it labels as the Venezuelan “narco-terrorist regime” into its broader fentanyl rhetoric. For example, following a U.S. strike on a Venezuelan vessel, Secretary of State Marco Rubio described the United States as being “flooded with cocaine and fentanyl and other drugs,” referred to Venezuela as “a common route,” and pointed to onward trafficking flows into Puerto Rico, Europe, and the U.S. mainland—without stating that fentanyl was confirmed aboard the vessel or that Venezuela produces the drug. Despite the absence of such evidence on fentanyl, Washington has continued to escalate military pressure on Caracas through expanded naval deployments, lethal strikes at sea, oil tanker seizures, and now a Trump-declared blockade.

The effect is to position Venezuela as a legitimate military target in a war against fentanyl without ever presenting evidence that fentanyl originates there. This absence of proof is not a flaw in the argument but a feature of the strategy. By acting without making evidentiary claims, the administration minimizes legal exposure, avoids congressional debate, and conditions the public to accept military escalation as justified. The fentanyl WMD designation thus functions less as a factual determination than as a legal solvent, dissolving the boundary between domestic law enforcement and the justification for initiating a war to topple a disliked foreign government.

Preparations for Coming Conflicts at Home and Abroad

As the Trump administration ratchets up pressure on Venezuela, multiple signals suggest preparation for conflict overseas and confrontation at home. These include not only the escalating attacks on Venezuelan shipping and declared blockade, but the ongoing purges of senior generals and admirals by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, consolidating control by removing officers apparently perceived as insufficiently loyal.

At the same time, Trump has abruptly promised every U.S. service member a holiday bonus of $1,776—a patriotically evocative figure—echoing the donatives used by Roman emperors to secure the loyalty of the Praetorian Guard during periods of political stress.

These moves suggest that the administration is aligning external military escalation with internal consolidation of authority.

Taking on The Enemy Within

The same logic is now being applied domestically. President Trump has repeatedly invoked the need to confront what he calls “the enemy within,” a phrase he has used variously to describe internal unrest, political opposition, and resistance to his agenda. Under this framework, domestic dissent is reframed as a security threat, and opposition to executive action becomes suspect by definition.

Domestic resistance to Trump administration policy—whether opposition to military action abroad, challenges to mass deportations justified as counter-narcoterrorism, or efforts to slow or obstruct enforcement—can be recast as obstruction of national defense, material support for terrorism, or assistance to WMD proliferation. The fentanyl order supplies the vocabulary and legal posture for that shift, even where the factual predicates are absent.

This approach mirrors the September 22, 2025 executive order designating “Antifa” as a terrorist organization on the unsupported premise that Antifa constitutes a coordinated, militarized enterprise seeking the violent overthrow of the United States government. Like the fentanyl order, the Antifa designation relies on an elastic definition of terrorism, untethered from findings about specific actors or acts. Association substitutes for proof; ideology substitutes for conduct.

The two orders provide a foundation for domestic repression by directing federal agencies to treat opposition to immigration enforcement, resistance to removals, or protest against military action as potential terrorism. What begins as assertions about drugs and terrorism becomes something much larger: a redefinition of crime as war, dissent as danger, and executive authority as unconstrained by the traditional distinctions between peace and conflict, foreign and domestic, civilian and military.

Taken together, these developments reveal not a series of discrete policy choices, but a governing theory: that presidential will substitutes for law; that national security absorbs criminal justice; and that the distinction between enemies abroad and enemies within is not a line to be respected, but a line to be erased.

Why is this happening now? Trump faces converging pressures: rising public anxiety over the cost of living, organized resistance to mass deportations, growing friction within the military and federal law enforcement, and approaching elections that threaten to reimpose legal and political limits on his freedom of action. The appeal of emergency framing—narco-terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, existential threat—is that it dissolves those limits. By recasting political opponents, migrants, and targeted foreign regimes as enemies of national survival, the administration places them outside the protection of ordinary law, clearing the way for the use of force at home as well as abroad by presidential decree.

None of this makes dictatorship inevitable. Institutions still exist; resistance still matters; choices still remain. But the direction of travel is clear—and it is one in which error, escalation, and overreach carry consequences not only for foreign civilians and American service members, but for the constitutional order at home.

Jonathan M. Winer, a former senior State Department official, is a member of The Steady State. The Steady State is a nonpartisan organization of more than 280 former senior national security professionals from the CIA, FBI, Department of State, Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security which advocates for constitutional democracy, the rule of law and the preservation of America’s national security institutions.