Trump asked Pentagon about bombing Mexican drug labs on suggestion of health official, book reports

(Image credit: Yuri Gripas/Abaca Press/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

published 29 September 2022

Former President Donald Trump considered bombing drug labs in Mexico after a top public health official, dressed in his military-like dress uniform, suggested putting "lead to target" to stop the flow of illegal drugs across the U.S.-Mexico border, New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman writes in her upcoming book on Trump, according to The Washington Post.

Trump raised the idea "several times, eventually asking a stunned Defense Secretary Mark Esper whether the United States could indeed bomb the labs," Haberman reports. Assistant Secretary for Health Brett Giroir, an admiral in the U.S. Public Health Service, often wore his dress uniform into Oval Office meetings with Trump, confusing the president, White House officials told Haberman for her book, Confidence Man. "The response from White House aides was not to try to change Trump's view, but to consider asking Giroir not to wear his uniform to the Oval Office anymore."

Giroir declined to publicly discuss his private conversations with Trump but told the Post that when it comes to Mexican drug labs, "every option needs to be on the table." Trump spokesman Taylor Budowich, as he has when presented with other reports from Haberman's book, dismissed it as a "boring" collection of "anonymously sourced fairytales." Among the more than 250 people Haberman spoke with for her book is Trump, who she interviewed three times.

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Confidence Man contains all sorts of dishy stories about Trump dating back to the 1980s, and you can reads some of them — why he sought out Black judges in his real estate lawsuits, how he told Rudy Giuliani to "go wild" as his lead lawyer challenging his election loss, the time he might have called a congresswoman pretending to be a newspaper reporter, his verbal abuse of female world leaders and mockery of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg as she was dying — at The Washington Post.

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Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.