El Presidente Donald Trump is the gringo version of brutal and corrupt
dictators foisted on Latin American countries by their oligarchs and Yankee
imperialists.͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
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America is a Banana Republic
El Presidente Donald Trump is the gringo version of brutal and corrupt
dictators foisted on Latin American countries by their oligarchs and Yankee
imperialists.
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| Chris Hedges |
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| Nov 10 |
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El Dookie - by Mr. Fish
El Presidente Trump is cast in the mold of all tinpot Latin American despots
who terrorize their populations, surround themselves with sycophants, goons and
crooks, and enrich themselves — Trump and his family have amassed more than
$1.8 billion in cash and gifts from leveraging the presidency — while erecting
tawdry monuments to themselves.
“Trujillo on Earth, God in Heaven” — Trujillo en la tierra, Dios en el cielo —
was posted by state order in churches during the 31-year reign of Rafael
Leónidas Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. His supporters, like Trump’s,
nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize. Trump’s con artist pastor, Paula
White-Cain, offered an updated version of Trujillo’s self-deification when she
warned, “To say no to President Trump would be saying no to God.”
Trump is the gringo version of Anastasio “Tachito” Somoza in Nicaragua or
Haiti’s François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, who amended the constitution to have
himself anointed “President for Life.” One of the most celebrated images of the
Haitian dictator’s long rule shows Jesus Christ with a hand on the shoulder of
a seated Papa Doc, with the caption, “I have chosen him.”
ICE thugs are the incubus of Papa Doc’s dreaded 15,000-strong Tonton Macoute,
his secret police who indiscriminately detained, beat, tortured, jailed or
killed 30,000 to 60,000 of Duvalier’s opponents and which, along with the
Presidential Guard, consumed half the state budget.
El Presidente Trump is Venezuela’s Juan Vicente Gómez, who looted the nation to
make himself the wealthiest man in the country and disdained public education
to — in the words of the scholar Paloma Griffero Pedemonte — “keep the people
ignorant and docile.”
El Presidente — in every dictatorship — follows the same playbook. It is a
grotesque opera buffa. No encomium is too outrageous. No bribe too small. No
violation of civil liberties too extreme. No stupidity too absurd. All dissent,
no matter how tepid, is treason.
Executive orders, budget cuts, gerrymandering, the seizure of polling stations
and voting machines, the abolition of mail-in balloting, the overseeing of the
vote count and the purging of voter rolls ensure fixed election results.
Institutions, from the press to the universities, kneel down before the idiocy
of El Presidente. Legislatures are obsequious echo chambers for El Presidente’s
whims and self-delusions. It is a world of magical realism, where fantasy
replaces reality, mythology replaces history, the immoral is moral, tyranny is
democracy and lies are true.
It is not only violence and intimidation that keep El Presidente in power. It
is the stupefying inversion of reality, the daily denial of what we perceive
and its replacement by disorienting fictions that keep us off balance. This,
combined with state-induced fear, turns countries into open-air prisons. Human
consciousness is bombarded until it is broken and becomes a well-oiled cog in
the vast carceral machine.
The warped psychology of El Presidente Trump is captured by Miguel Ángel
Asturias in his novel “El Señor Presidente,” inspired by the dictatorship of
Manuel Estrada Cabrera who ruled Guatemala for 22 years; Gabriel García
Márquez’s “The Autumn of the Patriarch,” Julia Alvarez’s “In the Time of the
Butterflies” and Mario Vargas Llosa’s “The Feast of the Goat” and “Conversation
in the Cathedral.” These novels offer better insight into where we are headed
than most tomes on U.S. politics.
“Everything is for sale here,” writes Julia Alvarez in her novel, “everything
but your freedom.”
Dictators — hermetically sealed in the cloying adulation of court life —
swiftly lose touch with reality. Conspiracy theories, quack science, bizarre
beliefs and superstitions take the place of evidence and facts. Sociopathic,
incapable of empathy or remorse and given to describing the world in
vulgarities and childish sentimentality, dictators cannot distinguish between
good and evil. They wield power solely for how it makes them feel. If they feel
good, it is good. If they feel bad, it is bad. L’état, c’est moi.
“The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility,”
Hannah Arendt writes in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” “he can never admit
an error. Mass leaders in power have one concern which overrules all
utilitarian considerations: to make their predictions come true.”
The dictator of El Salvador in the 1930s, Gen. Maximiliano Hernández Martínez,
who passed a series of laws that restricted Asian, Arab, and Black immigration
and who ordered the massacre of an estimated 30,000 peasants in the wake of an
abortive uprising in January 1932, was convinced sunlight cast through colored
bottles cured illnesses. In the midst of a smallpox epidemic, he ordered
colored lights to be hung throughout the capital, San Salvador. When his
youngest son had appendicitis, he brushed aside doctors to try his
colored-lights cure, which resulted in his son’s death. He turned down a
donation of rubber sandals for the country’s schoolchildren, announcing: “It is
good for children to go barefoot. That way they better receive the beneficial
effluvia of the planet, the vibrations of the Earth. Plants and animals do not
wear shoes.”
El Presidente Trump is cut from this vein. He does not exercise because he
insists the human body resembles a battery with a finite amount of energy. He
urged the public — during the COVID-19 crisis — to inject disinfectant into
themselves and irradiate with ultraviolet light. He warned pregnant women not
to take Tylenol during a press conference where he babbled incoherently,
suggesting it causes autism. He dismissed the climate crisis, tweeting, “The
concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make
U.S. manufacturing non-competitive,” only to later say he was joking while
claiming that “it’ll change back again.” The noise of wind turbines, he
suggested, causes cancer. Former Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, he
mused, may be the secret son of Fidel Castro.
Dictators wallow in kitsch. Kitsch requires zero intellectual investment. It
glorifies the state and the cult leader. It celebrates a fantasy world of
virtuous rulers, a happy, adoring population and idealized portraits of the
citizens. In the case of Trump, this means white citizens. It glitters and
sparkles, like the garish gold trophies and vases lined up on the mantelpiece
in the Oval Office that have been matched by equally tasteless gold coasters
with Trump’s name on them. It snuffs out culture. The National Symphony
Orchestra at the Kennedy Center now opens all its performances with the
national anthem. Trump, who appointed himself the new chairman of the center,
posted, “NO MORE DRAG SHOWS, OR OTHER ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA.”
This year’s season at the Kennedy Center, where the name Donald J. Trump has
been etched into the marble of the Hall of States, opened with “The Sound of
Music.” The Trump-appointed interim president of the Kennedy Center, Richard
Grenell, hopes to make the center’s programming more “like Paula Abdul.”
Milan Kundera described kitsch as an aesthetic, “in which shit is denied, and
everyone acts as though it does not exist,” adding that it is “a folding screen
set up to curtain off death.”
Trujillo raped the wives of his associates, ministers and generals, along with
courtesans and young girls. Trump, who was a close friend of pedophile Jeffrey
Epstein, has been accused of rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment by at
least two dozen women.
Julie Brown, in her book “Perversion of Justice: The Jeffrey Epstein Story,”
writes that an anonymous woman, using the pseudonym “Kate Johnson,” filed a
civil complaint in federal court in California in 2016, alleging she was raped
by Trump and Epstein — when she was 13 — over a four-month period from June to
September 1994.
“I loudly pleaded with Defendant Trump to stop,” she said in the lawsuit.
“Trump responded to my pleas by violently striking me in the face with his open
hand and screaming that he could do whatever he wanted.”
Johnson said she met Trump at one of Epstein’s “underage sex parties” at his
New York mansion. She says she was forced to have sex with Trump several times,
including once with another girl — 12 years old — whom she labeled “Marie Doe.”
Trump demanded oral sex and afterward “pushed both minors away while angrily
berating them for the ‘poor’ quality of their sexual performance,” according to
the lawsuit, filed in April 26, 2016, in the U.S. District Court in the Central
District of California.
When Epstein learned Trump had taken Johnson’s virginity, he allegedly
“attempted to strike her about the head with his closed fists,” furious that he
had lost the opportunity.
Trump, she said, did not take part in Epstein’s orgies. He liked to watch while
13-year-old “Kate Johnson” gave him a hand job.
Johnson said Epstein and Trump threatened to harm her and her family if she
spoke of their encounters.
The lawsuit was dropped, most probably by way of a lucrative settlement. She
has since disappeared.
Dictators are not content with silencing their critics and opponents. They take
sadistic delight in humiliating, ridiculing and destroying them.
“For my friends everything, for my enemies the law,” Óscar R. Benavides, the
authoritarian president of Peru said, summing up the credo of all dictators.
The law is weaponized as an instrument of revenge. Innocence and guilt are
irrelevant.
The Justice Department’s indictment of former Trump adviser John Bolton, New
York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI director James Comey, and
the subpoenas served to former CIA director John Brennan, former FBI special
agent Peter Strzok and former FBI lawyer Lisa Page, send the core message of
all dictatorships — collaborate or be persecuted.
This culture of vengeance calcifies civic and political life.
Dictators vainly seek what they cannot achieve: immortality. They flood their
countries with images of themselves to ward off death. Trujillo had the capital
Santo Domingo, renamed Ciudad Trujillo and the island’s highest mountain — Pico
Duarte — renamed Pico Trujillo.
Trump wants the proposed Washington Commanders $3.7 billion stadium to be named
after himself. The Treasury Department has released draft designs for a
commemorative one dollar coin — featuring Trump’s face on both sides — to
celebrate the nation’s 250th anniversary. There are plans to name the Kennedy
Center’s opera house after the first lady. The $40 million that Amazon paid for
the rights to film a documentary about Melania Trump, will no doubt replicate
the fawning coverage given to Elena Ceaușescu — known as “the Mother of the
Nation” — on Romanian state television during the reign of her husband, Nicolae
Ceaușescu.
Huge, expensive banners with El Presidente Trump’s face adorn the exterior of
federal buildings in the capital. This, along with the various Trump Towers
throughout the world, is just the beginning. Flood the world with Trump
portraits, emblazon his name on buildings and public squares, pay ceaseless
homage to his divinity and genius, and death is held at bay.
Mario Vargas Llosa writes in “The Feast of the Goat” how dictatorships turn
everyone into accomplices:
The rich too, if they wanted to go on being rich, had to ally themselves with
the Chief, sell him part of their businesses or buy part of his, and contribute
in this way to his greatness and power. With half-closed eyes, lulled by the
gentle sound of the sea, he thought of what a perverse system Trujillo created,
one in which all Dominicans sooner or later took part as accomplices, a system
which only exiles (not always) and the dead could escape. In this country, in
one way or another, everyone had been, was, or would be part of the regime.
“The worst thing that can happen to a Dominican is to be intelligent or
competent,” he had once heard Agustín Cabral say (“A very intelligent and
competent Dominican,” he told himself) and the words had been etched in his
mind: “Because sooner or later Trujillo will call upon him to serve the regime,
or his person, and when he calls, one is not permitted to say no.” He was proof
of this truth. It never occurred to him to put up the slightest resistance to
his appointments. As Estrella Sadhalá always said, the Goat had taken from
people the sacred attribute given to them by God: their free will.
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