Granite State bristles at ‘drug-infesteden’ dis by Donald
Granite State Republicans rankled by President Trump’s slam on New Hampshire as a “druginfested den” worry it frames the opiate scourge as a problem unique to their state — though some say he’s not far off.
Republican Gov. Chris Sununu led the pushback.
“The president is wrong,” Sununu said in a statement, adding that overdoses and drug-related deaths are declining in key parts of the state. “It’s disappointing his mischaracterization of this epidemic ignores the great things this state has to offer.”
Trump’s comment also drew jeers on Twitter from U.S. Sens. Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan, both of whom preceded Sununu as governor.
In Trump’s call, a transcript of which was obtained by The Washington Post and published yesterday, Trump tells Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto that “the drug lords in Mexico” are “knocking the hell out of our country.”
“They are sending drugs to Chicago, Los Angeles, and to New York. Up in New Hampshire — I won New Hampshire because New Hampshire is a druginfested den — is coming from the southern border,” Trump said, according to the transcript.
Republican Gene Chandler, deputy speaker of the state’s House of Representatives, said Trump’s comment was “a little overblown.”
“Obviously, there’s drug problems anywhere. We have a problem, but it’s not as severe as it is in some other places,” Chandler said, questioning if Trump’s promises to tackle opiate addiction were in fact central to his local support. “It was more that New Hampshire folks were fed up with the status quo, and wanted someone to stir it up a little bit.”
Former New Hampshire GOP Chairman Fergus Cullen, who opposed Trump, said the comment is “another example of the president having a sense of reality that is completely detached from what’s really going on.”
“He’s prone to making these outrageous and demonstrably false statements on such a wide array of subjects,” he said. “I don’t think it was a factor
in his win in the primary. Hillary Clinton was talking about the issue, too, and she lost the primary.”
New Hampshire saw 26.61 heroin or fentanyl related deaths per 10,000 residents last year, the New Hampshire Drug Monitoring Initiative reported. According to the Centers for Disease Control, New Hampshire had the second highest rate of overdose death nationwide in 2015, behind only West Virginia.
New Hampshire state Rep. Al Baldasaro, who co-chaired Trump’s campaign there, said the remark — made in a Jan. 28 phone call with the president of Mexico — was apt at the time, before Sununu’s “Operation Granite Hammer” crackdown began to make a dent.
“To me, he’s 100 percent right,” Baldasaro said of Trump. “We are doing a lot better since we’ve put in Operation Hammer, and we’ve invested more money in the drug programs in the courts. He’s talking about past tense. Before Gov. Sununu was the governor, we had so many issues.”