CNN Legal Analyst Dismantles Trump’s Latest Executive Order: ‘It Is Completely Meaningless’

The executive order President Donald Trump signed Monday designating fentanyl and the opioid’s precursor chemicals as weapons of mass destruction has “zero legal impact,” said CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig during a “NewsNight” appearance later that evening.

“It is completely meaningless,” said Honig. “It’s symbolic. Federal law describes what a weapon of mass destruction is. Generally, it has to be an incendiary device, something that blows up, something that shoots, something that disseminates poison, that kind of thing.”

He added, “If you commit a crime involving a weapon of mass destruction, it’s very serious. Penalties involved could be life in prison, could be death if someone dies. But the president saying drugs or fentanyl are now weapons of mass destruction has zero, zero legal impact.”

The U.S. has launched deadly military strikes against alleged drug smugglers in Caribbean and Pacific waters since September, with Trump maintaining that these potentially extrajudicial killings aim almost exclusively to curb the flow of narcotics into the country.

Honig argued Trump has no authority to designate drugs as weapons, let alone WMDs.

“It’s up to the judges,” he said Monday. “It’s up to the parties on a case-by-case basis. It’s an interesting argument. It doesn’t meet the definition. But it’s like, if the president declared that a slingshot is a firearm, it doesn’t make it a firearm, for legal purposes.”

Guest host Sara Sidner noted that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention counted more than 80,000 overdose deaths across the U.S. in 2024 alone, and that fentanyl plays a central role in the ongoing opioid crisis and its annual fatalities.

“And it is a killer, a lethal killer like we’ve never seen,” Honig acknowledged. “And I approve of and applaud the administration for being ultra-aggressive in going after it. But that doesn’t mean you get to blow up everything you want, anywhere you want.”

The Trump administration has killed at least 90 people with their strikes on alleged drug boats, killing shipwrecked survivors during a Sept. 2 operation near Venezuela that left even some Republicans concerned that the incident could constitute a war crime.