America Is A Banana Republic Chris Hedges

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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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Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University, and the University of Toronto.

[Find the link to the web version of this article and the link to subscribe to Chris Hedges on Substack in the comments]

Bittersweet Border Symphony

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President for Life

 President for Life

Donald Trump is trying to amass the powers of a king.

By J. Michael Luttig

In the normal course of history, the president of the United States is a figure who inspires optimism in the American people. The 47th president prefers to stir feelings of fear, vulnerability, hopelessness, and political inevitability—the sense that he, and only he, can rescue the nation from looming peril. Since his second inauguration, Donald Trump has seized authoritarian control over the federal government and demanded the obedience of the other powerful institutions of American society—universities, law firms, media companies. The question weighing heavily on the minds of many Americans is whether Trump will subvert next year’s midterm elections or the 2028 presidential election to extend his reign.

With his every word and deed, Trump has given Americans reason to believe that he will seek a third term, in defiance of the Constitution. It seems abundantly clear that he will hold on to the office at any cost, including America’s ruin.

The Founders of our nation foresaw a figure like Trump, a demagogue who would ascend to the presidency and refuse to relinquish power to a successor chosen by the American people in a free and fair election. Writing to James Madison from Paris in 1787, Thomas Jefferson warned that such an incumbent, if narrowly defeated, would “pretend false votes, foul play, hold possession of the reins of government.” Were that moment ever to come, the Founders believed, it would mark the demise of the nation that they had conceived, bringing to a calamitous end the greatest experiment in self-government ever attempted by man.
Trump proved in 2021 that he would do anything to remain in the White House. Even after the violence of January 6, his second impeachment, and the conviction and incarceration of scores of his followers, he reiterated his willingness to subvert the 2024 election. That proved unnecessary. Yet since his victory, Trump has again told the American people that he is prepared to do what it takes to remain in power, the Constitution be damned.
In March, Trump refused to rule out a third term, saying that he was “not joking” about the prospect and claiming that “there are methods which you could do it.” He was asked about the idea of Vice President J. D. Vance running for the presidency, getting elected, and then passing the baton back to him. “That’s one,” he said. “But there are others, too.” As he so often does, Trump later claimed that he wasn’t being serious. But also in March, Trump’s ally Steve Bannon said that he is “a firm believer that President Trump will run and win again in 2028,” adding that he and others are working on ways to do it, which would require circumventing the Twenty-Second Amendment. (Bannon later told The Economist: “Trump is gonna be president in ’28, and people just ought to get accommodated with that.” He added, “At the appropriate time, we’ll lay out what the plan is. But there’s a plan.”) In September, after meeting with congressional leaders about the looming government shutdown, Trump posted photographs on Truth Socialin which trump 2028 hats rested prominently on his Oval Office desk. In October, when discussing the possibility of a third term, Trump said, “I would love to do it. I have my best numbers ever.”

We Americans are by nature good people who believe in the inherent goodness of others, especially those we elect to represent us in the highest office in the land. But we ignore such statements and other expressions of Trump’s intent at our peril. The 47th president is a vain man, and nothing would flatter his vanity more than seizing another term. Doing so would signify the ultimate triumph over his political enemies.  I am not a Pollyanna, nor am I a Cassandra. I was at the forefront of the conservative legal movement that began in 1981 with the inauguration of Ronald Reagan. I have had the privilege of spending much of my career in public service, first in the Ford and Reagan White Houses; then in the Department of Justice; and, finally, appointed by George H. W. Bush, in the federal judiciary. I have never once in more than four decades believed that any president—Democrat or Republican—would intentionally violate the Constitution or a law of the United States. But Trump is different from all prior presidents in his utter contempt for the Constitution and America’s democracy.

The clearest evidence that Trump may subvert upcoming elections is that he tried to overturn the 2020 election. He shocked the nation and the world when he ordered then–Vice President Mike Pence not to certify the votes electing Joe Biden president, while claiming that the election had been stolen from him by his “radical left” enemies, whoever they are. When Pence refused to yield to Trump’s demand, Trump instigated the attack on the U.S. Capitol to prevent Congress from counting the votes and certifying Biden as his successor.

On January 6, Trump tweeted, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution,” further inflaming the crowd that had already breached the Capitol. Witnesses before the January 6 committee testified that Trump expressed support for hanging Pencewhile the attack was under way. Trump was prosecuted by the United States for having committed the gravest crime that a president can commit: attempting to remain in the presidency after losing an election and thereby obstructing the peaceful transfer of power. Yet he continues to deny that he lost the election. He describes January 6 as a glorious day in American history, not one of its darkest.

Among his first acts after being sworn in again was pardoning or commuting the sentences of every person convicted in connection with January 6. He then set about exacting revenge on the American justice system. He summarily fired dozens of government officials who had tried to hold him accountable for the attack on the Capitol, as well as for his other alleged criminal offenses of removing classified documents from the White House upon his departure, secreting them to Mar-a-Lago, and obstructing the government’s efforts to find and retrieve the documents. He has since replaced those fired officials with loyalists—sycophants committed to him, not to our democracy or the rule of law.

Today, Trump has vastly greater powers than he did in 2020. He has a willing vice president to preside over the joint session of Congress that will certify (or not) the next election, a second in command who refuses to admit that his boss lost the 2020 election. (Vance has said that he would not have certified the results without asking states such as Pennsylvania and Georgia to submit new slates of electors, a solution he invented to a problem that does not exist—there is no evidence of widespread fraud in those states or any state in 2020.) Trump’s party controls both houses of Congress, and he will surely do everything he can to maintain those majorities. The Supreme Court, meanwhile, has paved the way for a third Trump term, as it did for his current term, by essentially granting him absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for any crimes he might commit in violation of the Constitution or the laws of the United States.

For anyone who doubts that Trump is contemplating a monarchical reign, consider how very far down that road he already is. Since returning to office, he has sought absolute power, unchecked by the other branches of government, the 50 states, or the free press.

On the first day of his current term, he launched a direct attack on the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of birthright citizenship when he issued an executive order contradicting the clear language of the amendment, federal statute, and Supreme Court precedent.

He has arrogated to himself Congress’s power to levy tariffs, declaring that previous foreign-trade and economic practices had created a national emergency justifying his unilateral imposition of sweeping global tariffs. When Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell predicted that Trump’s unlawful tariffs would cause “higher inflation and slower growth,” Trump wrote on Truth Social that “Powell’s termination cannot come fast enough!” Later, he fired Fed Governor Lisa Cook, purportedly “for cause.” 

The Supreme Court has temporarily blocked Cook’s firing, but it won’t decide until next year whether Trump has the power to fire a member of the independent Federal Reserve. A ruling in Trump’s favor would give him absolute control over the central bank and thus over the monetary policy of the United States.

He has usurped Congress’s spending and appropriation powers by attempting to impound billions of dollars that Congress designated for specific purposes, including for public broadcasting, for Voice of America, and for desperately needed U.S. aid to starving and disease-stricken populations around the world.

He has likewise usurped Congress’s power to establish executive-branch departments and agencies, fund their operations, and provide civil-service protections to federal-government employees, unilaterally overhauling the U.S. government. He has hollowed out the Department of Education, effectively abolishing it. He has dismantled the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and asserted executive control over the independent Federal Election Commission and Federal Trade Commission, and fired thousands of federal employees without reasonable cause or explanation—all while Congress has stood by silently.

The Supreme Court, too, has largely given the president its imprimatur to continue his power grab. It has either effectively reversed lower-court rulings against the president using the so-called shadow docket, or allowed the administration to proceed until the Court determines the constitutionality of various actions, by which time the damage to the Constitution, the U.S. government, and American society will have been done, as the justices well know. When the Court has ruled against Trump—for example, forbidding him from deporting undocumented immigrants without due process—he has provoked a constitutional crisis by ignoring the order.

The Founders built layers of safeguards into the American system of government to constrain a president, not just the checks and balances by the branches of the federal government. But Trump has run roughshod over these fail-safes, too. In violation of the sovereign rights reserved for them by the Constitution, Trump has commanded state officials to aid him in his purge of undocumented immigrants.

The president has also taken military command of cities across the country—over the vehement objection of the states. When a federal judge held that Trump’s military occupation of Portland, Oregon, was unlawful, he circumvented her orders and trashed the judge—whom he appointed—for her ruling, saying that she should be “ashamed” of herself.

Given that Trump has for years pronounced the free press in America “the enemy of the people,” it came as no surprise when media companies were among the first Trump targeted with unconstitutional edicts. In return for his favor, many of the country’s major media institutions have surrendered to him.

Though he claims to be a great friend of free enterprise, Trump has asserted dominion over the economy and insinuated his administration into American capitalism so that our great businesses are dependent on and subject to the government, as they are in communist and socialist nations.

He has extorted the nation’s legal profession, forcing law firms to betray their clients and the law in order to secure his favor. He has bludgeoned the nation’s colleges and universities with lawless order after lawless order. The federal government cannot tell universities how to conduct their affairs or dictate the viewpoints that professors teach. The First Amendment zealously guards such decisions, and the Constitution categorically forbids the president from wielding Congress’s power of the purse to punish these institutions.

Trump has turned the federal government against the American people, transforming the nation’s institutions into instruments for his vengeful execution of the law against honorable citizens for perceived personal and political offenses. He has silenced dissent by persecuting and threatening to prosecute American citizens for speaking critically of him, and he has divided us, turning us against one another so that we cannot oppose him.

Trump has always told us exactly who he is. We have just not wanted to believe him. But we must believe him now.

This is the man who said in January 2016, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, okay? It’s, like, incredible.”

The man who proposed in 2022 that the “Massive Fraud” he alleged in the 2020 election “allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” and who proclaimed, soon after reassuming office, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”

The man who, when asked the question “Don’t you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States as president?,” answered, “I don’t know.” And the man who, when asked whether every person in the United States is entitled to due process, replied, “I don’t know.”

The man who said in August that he can “do anything I want to do,” because he’s president.

The man who has demanded that his attorney general and Department of Justice immediately prosecute his enemies: “We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility. They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”

And the man who summoned American military generals from around the world to Quantico, Virginia, to tell them that “America is under invasion from within,” repeatedly describing that enemy invasion as being by the “radical left,” a term he now seemingly uses to characterize all of his political opponents. He also said at this meeting, “We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military” for fighting the “war from within.”

Donald Trump is clearly willing to subvert an election in order to hold on to the power he so craves, and he is now fully enabled to undermine national elections. No one can prevent him from remaining president of the United States for a constitutionally prohibited third term—except the American people, in whom ultimate power resides under the Constitution of the United States.