Citing Alice Johnson, Baier Trips Up Trump on Death Penalty for Drug Dealers

It's rare to find a hero on Fox News, but Bret Baier did a surprisingly great job tripping up Donald Trump on his repeated call for the death penalty for drug dealers. In an interview with Baier this week, Trump first confirmed his position, citing China and Singapore who (he says) have "zero drug problems" because of their death penalty policies.

Trump claimed that China lost territory to other countries in the past because they were "all drugged out" (due to the Opium Wars, presumably) and said that drug dealers—adding there are "plenty of female drug dealers too"—kill an average of 500 people in their lifetime (as usual without any factual basis for his "truth").

Baier then brought up Trump's support of the First Step Act, which released (mostly) nonviolent offenders including Alice Johnson, a black grandmother who had served almost 22 years for a first-time, nonviolent drug crime until she was advocated for by Kim Kardashian. (On her reality show, Kim is shown meeting about Johnson with Trump, who only wanted to talk about her suck-up husband Kanye West.)

Trump made a public spectacle of granting clemency to Johnson at the 2019 State of the Union speech, and she appeared a SuperBowl ad to tout Trump's criminal justice record.

During the interview with Baier, Trump brought up Johnson, who Trump said “got treated terribly” and “unfairly,” equating her treatment to his own. He said that Johnson’s trafficking activity was “mostly marijuana”—though her convictions largely concerned alleged cocaine sales, reports Marijuana Moment. 

“But she’d be killed under your plan,” Baier pointed out. 

 “Huh?” Trump replied. 

 “As a drug dealer,” Baier said. 

 “No, no, no, under my—oh, under that? Uh...it would depend on the severity,” Trump responded. 

 “She’s technically a former drug dealer. She had multimillion-dollar cocaine rings. So even Alice Johnson?” Baier pressed. 

Trump offered that Johnson wouldn’t be killed because his death sentence policy wouldn’t be retroactive and would “start as of now.” When Baier scoffed at that, Trump ventured that Johnson wouldn’t have engaged in drug trafficking if the crime was punishable by death at the time, making a deterrence argument. 

He even suggested that the fentanyl problem would have been solved under a second Trump administration because he'd met with President Xi about him executing fentanyl dealers. He also claimed that 12 times as many drugs are coming across the border now as when he was president (another unsubstantiated statement), before reiterating that "the only way" to solve the drug problem was to execute dealers.

Trump, the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, recently attempted to link mass shootings to “genetically modified” marijuana at a speech before the NRA. RFK Jr., who is running for the Democratic presidential nomination, blamed school shootings on prescription drugs in a Twitter discussion earlier this month, telling Elon Musk, “Prior to the introduction of Prozac, we had almost none of these events." 

UPDATE 6/24: Baier is the first national newscaster to mention the imprisonment in Russia of American schoolteacher Marc Fogel over a marijuana charge.