By Ted Snider
The American Conservative
December 6, 2025
The people of Honduras had not yet made up their minds. So, Donald Trump intervened to help them.
The major candidates in Sunday's election were Rixi Moncada, the former defense minister of the ruling left-wing LIBRE party, who had promised to continue President Xiomara Castro's agenda; Nasry "Tito" Asfura, a construction magnate who is running for the right-wing National Party on a free market platform; and Salvador Nasralla, formerly of the LIBRE party, who broke with them and moved to a centrist anticorruption platform.
In the lead-up to the election, the polls suggested a three-way race with no clear favorite. But Trump had a favorite.
Firing off two Truth Social posts within 18 minutes of each other, Trump dramatically intervened in the election.
With Venezuela under threat of U.S. military intervention, Trump's posts widened the focus of the threat to encompass Honduras. "Will Maduro and his Narcoterrorists take over another country like they have taken over Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela?" Trump asked. The only way to remove themselves from America's gun sights was, apparently, to vote for Asfura, the right-wing candidate. "The man who is standing up for Democracy, and fighting against Maduro," Trump said, "is Tito Asfura, the Presidential Candidate of the National Party." The threat was clear: a vote for Moncada is a vote for Venezuela that puts Honduras at risk of war; a vote for Asfura is a vote for America to fight against Maduro. "Tito and I can work together to fight the Narcocommunists.... I cannot work with Moncada and the Communists," Trump told the voters of Honduras.
And the threat was not only military but also economic. Right after hitting "post" on his first message, another thought struck Trump that Hondurans needed to hear: "If Tito Asfura wins for President of Honduras, because the United States has so much confidence in him, his Policies, and what he will do for the Great People of Honduras, we will be very supportive. If he doesn't win, the United States will not be throwing good money after bad."
With the threat of military and economic intervention now clear, Trump declared, "Democracy is on trial in the coming Elections," and he left it to the people of "the beautiful country of Honduras" to decide.
Moncada was not guilty of hyperbole or sensationalism when she complained that Trump's posts, "three days before the election," were "totally interventionist."
This is not the first time the U.S. has lacked the patience to wait for an election before undertaking an intervention or a coup. The preemptive soft coup, whether by endorsement, diplomatic support, removal from the ballot, threat of sanctions, or smearing the vote as illegitimate ahead of its taking place, has recently been a popular page in the American interventionist handbook. Such interventions have been undertaken in several recent elections, including Venezuela, Haiti, Ecuador, and Argentina.
One of the key congresspeople keeping tabs on the Honduran election is Rep. Maria Salazar (R-FL). She is hardly averse to non-democratic transfers of power in Honduras. When Honduras's President Manuel Zelaya, the founder of the LIBRE party, was ousted in a 2009 coup, Salazar said "thank God... Mr. Zelaya was out of office."
The U.S. role in the 2009 coup has not given America a good résumé in Honduras. On June 28, 2009, Manuel Zelaya was seized at gunpoint and whisked away in a plane that, unsubtly, refueled at a U.S. military base. The U.S. knew it was a coup. A July 24, 2009 cable sent from the U.S. embassy in Honduras says, "There is no doubt that the military, Supreme Court and National Congress conspired on June 28 in what constituted an illegal and unconstitutional coup...." As an exclamation point, it adds, "none of the... arguments [of the coup defenders] has any substantive validity under the Honduran constitution."
Nonetheless, when the UN and the Organization of American States (OAS) called for the return of the elected president, the U.S. did not. And when the UN and the OAS refused to recognize the coup president, the U.S. did. Then-Secretary of State Clinton has admitted that she aided the coup government by shoring it up and blocking the return of the elected government: "In the subsequent days [after the coup] I spoke with my counterparts around the hemisphere, including Secretary [Patricia] Espinosa in Mexico. We strategized on a plan to restore order in Honduras and ensure that free and fair elections could be held quickly and legitimately, which would render the question of Zelaya moot."