Trump is now feeling comfortable enough with his proposal to execute drug dealers that he's willing to start spouting it in public. Saturday's big Trump speech was supposed to be a rally for Republican congressional candidate Rick Something-or-other, but as usual it instead veered into a Trump monologue on whatever was going through his mind at the time.
Trump said that allowing prosecutors to seek the death penalty for drug dealers — an idea he said he got from Chinese President Xi Jinping — is “a discussion we have to start thinking about. I don’t know if this country’s ready for it.”
While it is true that Trump has been continually impressed by the policy ideas of the world's autocrats (of Xi Jinping's new status as Chinese president for life, Trump "joked" to a Mar-a-Lago audience that "maybe we'll give that a shot"), it is not likely that Trump got this particular "idea" from China. Neither China's infamous treatment of their prisoners nor their executions of drug dealers have curtailed their own drug problems, making it a shallow boast indeed by the Chinese leader.
But Trump has been obsessed with the "success" of a different authoritarian, Philippines leader Rodrigo Duterte, in acting aggressively against his nation's drug dealers. The Duterte model has been extrajudicial assassinations of accused dealers and users; for this, Trump praised him as doing an "unbelievable job on the drug problem." So if you're looking for the true inspiration of the idea, that would be it. Trump supporters presumably think we should consider ourselves lucky that Trump is, at least in public, willing to moderate it down to "let's follow China's lead on capital punishment."
But what this likely means in practice is that all of Team Trump's other would-be efforts to combat opioid addiction are dead on arrival.
Republicans inside and outside the White House have no stomach for spending money on the problem. Under Jeff Sessions, the Department of Justice is returning to a belief in maximal incarceration. It is of course purely coincidental that in the United States, drug sentences disproportionately target minority populations, and so a new effort to execute dealers would disproportionately be aimed at non-white Americans as well.
So rather than acting on any of the proposals of either experts or the noted non-experts of Trump's own anti-drug task force, what we're instead going to get is Donald Trump shouting that America is weak and needs to get strong during each one of his protofascist rallies, by doing what he sees as the maximally "strong" thing: killing people. By summertime, they will be writing it on hats.