5 Reasons To Doubt Trump's Boast About Bringing Down Fentanyl Smuggling
A drop in seizures doesn't necessarily mean a decline in the supply.
"The flow of deadly fentanyl across our border is down by a record 56 percent in one year," President Donald Trump bragged during his State of the Union address on Tuesday night. That claim is puzzling for several reasons.
First of all, Trump does not actually know how much illicit fentanyl entered the country in 2024 or 2025. Since black markets are inherently difficult to track, the government cannot accurately measure such quantities.
Trump presumably is referring to the recent decline in fentanyl seizures at the border. From 2024 to 2025, judging from the numbers published by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the amount seized fell by about 48 percent, which is not quite 56 percent but close enough.
Just last week, however, Trump claimed that his tariffs, "together with our strong borders," had "reduced fentanyl coming into our country by 30 percent." It is not clear why his estimate jumped by 26 percentage points in just a few days. Nor is it clear exactly how tariffs could have stopped fentanyl from entering the United States.
Since Trump has talked about "tariffing the value of this horrible and deadly drug in order to make it more costly to distribute and buy," he seems to think drug traffickers pay import taxes on their illegal products. Somewhat more realistically, he has presented tariffs as a way of pressuring China, Mexico, and Canada into cooperating more enthusiastically with the war on drugs.
Why Canada? Because Trump thinks our neighbor to the north is an important source of illicit fentanyl, which it isn't. But Mexico is the main source of illicit fentanyl, and China is an important supplier of precursor chemicals. Did Trump's tariffs quickly persuade those countries to step up? If so, the effect must have been not only immediate but retroactive, since the downward trend in fentanyl seizures began before the tariffs took effect.
Whatever you make of that claim, a drop in fentanyl seizures does not necessarily indicate a decline in the supply of the drug available to Americans. It could instead reflect shifts in trafficking patterns, which in turn might be caused by increased enforcement along particular routes. It could mean that the government seized a smaller percentage of shipments in 2025 than it did in 2024.
Another difficulty: If a drop in fentanyl seizures is a sign of success, does that mean an increase in fentanyl seizures is a sign of failure? That seems inconsistent with the way the government usually portrays such numbers. At a Cabinet meeting last year, for example, Attorney General Pam Bondi bragged about the impressive quantity of fentanyl—"22 million fentanyl pills" and "3,400 kilos of fentanyl"—that the Trump administration had intercepted during its first 100 days.
By Bondi's preposterous estimate, those seizures had saved "258 million lives." But for the Trump administration's heroic prosecution of the war on drugs, in other words, three-quarters of the U.S. population would have succumbed to fentanyl overdoses.
Setting aside Bondi's dubious logic and numbers, the clear implication of her argument was that the number of drug deaths prevented is proportional to the amount of fentanyl seized. If that were true, a 48 percent reduction in fentanyl seizures could be expected to have a disastrous impact on drug deaths.
In reality, U.S. fentanyl deaths dropped by an estimated 35 percent in 2024, when seizures were relatively high. But the downward trend continued into 2025, when seizures were relatively low. During the year ending last September, according to provisional estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 40,000 people died after consuming fentanyl, down from more than 56,000 during the year ending the previous September—a 29 percent drop.
If we assumed that trends in drug deaths are driven mainly by presidential policy, Trump could take credit for the drop during his first year in office. But by the same logic, we could thank Joe Biden for the similarly large decline in 2024, and we should blame Trump for the record increase recorded during his last year in office.
Given the many other factors that may account for these trends, we probably should be cautious about such attributions of responsibility. But if politicians are determined to brag about their influence, they should at least decide which metrics they are using and what they mean.
If the test is pounds of fentanyl seized during a given period, for instance, we should have some idea of what counts as a passing grade. When a number is cause for boasting regardless of whether it is growing or shrinking, there is probably something wrong with that measure of success.