{"id":307311,"date":"2025-11-17T12:01:42","date_gmt":"2025-11-17T12:01:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=307311"},"modified":"2025-11-11T05:57:45","modified_gmt":"2025-11-11T05:57:45","slug":"the-usa-is-a-banana-republic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2025\/11\/the-usa-is-a-banana-republic\/","title":{"rendered":"The USA Is a Banana Republic"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

El Dookie – by Mr. Fish<\/p><\/div>\n

El Presidente Donald Trump is the gringo version of brutal and corrupt dictators foisted on Latin American countries by their oligarchs and Yankee imperialists.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

10 Nov 2025<\/em> –\u00a0El 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 \u2014 Trump and his family have amassed<\/a> more than $1.8 billion in cash and gifts from leveraging the presidency \u2014 while erecting<\/a> tawdry monuments to themselves.<\/p>\n

\u201cTrujillo on Earth, God in Heaven\u201d \u2014 Trujillo en la tierra, Dios en el cielo<\/em> \u2014 was posted by state order in churches during the 31-year reign of Rafael Le\u00f3nidas Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. His supporters, like Trump\u2019s, nominated<\/a> him for the Nobel Peace Prize. Trump\u2019s con artist pastor, Paula White-Cain, offered an updated version of Trujillo\u2019s self-deification when she warned<\/a>, \u201cTo say no to President Trump would be saying no to God.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump is the gringo version of Anastasio \u201cTachito\u201d Somoza in Nicaragua or Haiti\u2019s Fran\u00e7ois \u201cPapa Doc\u201d Duvalier, who amended the constitution to have himself anointed<\/a> \u201cPresident for Life.\u201d One of the most celebrated images of the Haitian dictator\u2019s long rule shows Jesus Christ with a hand on the shoulder of a seated Papa Doc, with the caption, \u201cI have chosen him.\u201d<\/p>\n

ICE thugs are the incubus of Papa Doc\u2019s dreaded<\/a> 15,000-strong<\/a> Tonton Macoute, his secret police who indiscriminately detained, beat, tortured, jailed or killed 30,000 to 60,000 of Duvalier\u2019s opponents<\/a> and which, along with the Presidential Guard, consumed half the state budget.<\/p>\n

El Presidente Trump is Venezuela<\/a>\u2019s Juan Vicente G\u00f3mez<\/a>, who looted the nation to make himself the wealthiest man in the country and disdained public education to \u2014 in the words<\/a> of the scholar Paloma Griffero Pedemonte \u2014 \u201ckeep the people ignorant and docile.\u201d<\/p>\n

El Presidente \u2014 in every dictatorship \u2014 follows the same playbook. It is a grotesque opera buffa<\/em>. 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> election results.<\/p>\n

Institutions, from the press to the universities, kneel down before the idiocy of El Presidente. Legislatures are obsequious echo chambers for El Presidente\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The warped psychology of El Presidente Trump is captured by Miguel \u00c1ngel Asturias in his novel \u201cEl Se\u00f1or Presidente<\/a>,\u201d inspired by the dictatorship of Manuel Estrada Cabrera who ruled Guatemala for 22 years; Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez\u2019s \u201cThe Autumn of the Patriarch<\/a>,\u201d Julia Alvarez\u2019s \u201cIn the Time of the Butterflies\u201d<\/a> and Mario Vargas Llosa\u2019s \u201cThe Feast of the Goat<\/a>\u201d and \u201cConversation in the Cathedral<\/a>.\u201d These novels offer better insight into where we are headed than most tomes on U.S. politics.<\/p>\n

\u201cEverything is for sale here,\u201d writes Julia Alvarez in her novel, \u201ceverything but your freedom.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dictators \u2014 hermetically sealed in the cloying adulation of court life \u2014 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\u2019\u00e9tat, c\u2019est moi<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility,\u201d Hannah Arendt writes in \u201cThe Origins of Totalitarianism<\/a>,\u201d \u201che can never admit an error. Mass leaders in power have one concern which overrules all utilitarian considerations: to make their predictions come true.\u201d<\/p>\n

The dictator of El Salvador in the 1930s, Gen. Maximiliano Hern\u00e1ndez Mart\u00ednez, who passed a series of laws that restricted<\/a> Asian, Arab, and Black immigration and who ordered the massacre<\/a> 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<\/a> his colored-lights cure, which resulted in his son\u2019s death. He turned down a donation of rubber sandals for the country\u2019s schoolchildren, announcing: \u201cIt 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

El Presidente Trump is cut from this vein. He does not exercise because he insists<\/a> the human body resembles a battery with a finite amount of energy. He urged<\/a> the public \u2014 during the COVID-19 crisis \u2014 to inject disinfectant into themselves and irradiate with ultraviolet light. <\/strong>He warned pregnant women not to take Tylenol during a press conference where he babbled incoherently<\/a>, suggesting it causes autism. He dismisse<\/a>d<\/a> the climate crisis, tweeting, \u201cThe concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive,\u201d only to later say he was joking while claiming that \u201cit\u2019ll change back again.\u201d The noise of wind turbines, he s<\/a>uggested<\/a>, causes cancer. Former Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, he mused<\/a>, may be the secret son of Fidel Castro.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s name on them. It snuffs out culture. The National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center now opens<\/a> all its performances with the national anthem. Trump, who appointed himself the new chairman of the center, posted<\/a>, \u201cNO MORE DRAG SHOWS, OR OTHER ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA.\u201d<\/p>\n

This year\u2019s season at the Kennedy Center, where the name Donald J. Trump has been etched into the marble of the Hall of States, opened with \u201cThe Sound of Music.\u201d The Trump-appointed interim president of the Kennedy Center, Richard Grenell, hopes to make the center\u2019s programming more \u201clike Paula Abdul.\u201d<\/p>\n

Milan Kundera described kitsch as an aesthetic, \u201cin which shit is denied, and everyone acts as though it does not exist,\u201d adding that it is \u201ca folding screen set up to curtain off death.\u201d<\/p>\n

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<\/a> of rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment by at least two dozen women.<\/p>\n

Julie Brown, in her book \u201cPerversion of Justice: The Jeffrey Epstein Story,<\/a>\u201d writes that an anonymous woman, using the pseudonym \u201cKate Johnson,\u201d filed a civil complaint in federal court in California in 2016, alleging she was raped by Trump and Epstein \u2014 when she was 13 \u2014 over a four-month period from June to September 1994.<\/p>\n

\u201cI loudly pleaded with Defendant Trump to stop,\u201d she said<\/a> in the lawsuit. \u201cTrump responded to my pleas by violently striking me in the face with his open hand and screaming that he could do whatever he wanted.\u201d<\/p>\n

Johnson said she met Trump at one of Epstein\u2019s \u201cunderage sex parties\u201d at his New York mansion. She says she was forced to have sex with Trump several times, including once with another girl \u2014 12 years old \u2014 whom she labeled \u201cMarie Doe.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump demanded oral sex and afterward \u201cpushed both minors away while angrily berating them for the \u2018poor\u2019 quality of their sexual performance,\u201d according to<\/a> the lawsuit, filed in April 26, 2016, in the U.S. District Court in the Central District of California.<\/p>\n

When Epstein learned Trump had taken Johnson\u2019s virginity, he allegedly \u201cattempted to strike her about the head with his closed fists,\u201d furious that he had lost the opportunity.<\/p>\n

Trump, she said, did not take part in Epstein\u2019s orgies. He liked to watch while 13-year-old \u201cKate Johnson\u201d gave him a hand job.<\/p>\n

Johnson said Epstein and Trump threatened to harm her and her family if she spoke of their encounters.<\/p>\n

The lawsuit was dropped, most probably by way of a lucrative settlement. She has since disappeared.<\/p>\n

Dictators are not content with silencing their critics and opponents. They take sadistic delight in humiliating, ridiculing and destroying them.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor my friends everything, for my enemies the law,\u201d \u00d3scar 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.<\/p>\n

The Justice Department\u2019s indictment<\/a> 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 \u2014 collaborate or be persecuted<\/em>.<\/p>\n

This culture of vengeance calcifies civic and political life.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s highest mountain \u2014 Pico Duarte \u2014 renamed Pico Trujillo.<\/p>\n

Trump wants the proposed Washington Commanders $3.7 billion stadium to be named<\/a> after himself. The Treasury Department has released<\/a> draft designs for a commemorative one dollar coin \u2014 featuring Trump\u2019s face on both sides \u2014 to celebrate the nation\u2019s 250th anniversary. There are plans<\/a> to name the Kennedy Center\u2019s 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 Ceau\u0219escu \u2014 known as \u201cthe Mother of the Nation\u201d \u2014 on Romanian state television during the reign of her husband, Nicolae Ceau\u0219escu.<\/p>\n

Huge, expensive banners with El Presidente Trump\u2019s face adorn<\/a> the exterior of federal buildings in the capital. This, along with the various<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

Mario Vargas Llosa writes in \u201cThe Feast of the Goat\u201d how dictatorships turn everyone into accomplices:<\/p>\n

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. \u201cThe worst thing that can happen to a Dominican is to be intelligent or competent,\u201d he had once heard Agust\u00edn Cabral say (\u201cA very intelligent and competent Dominican,\u201d he told himself) and the words had been etched in his mind: \u201cBecause 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.\u201d He was proof of this truth. It never occurred to him to put up the slightest resistance to his appointments. As Estrella Sadhal\u00e1 always said, the Goat had taken from people the sacred attribute given to them by God: their free will.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\n

______________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize\u2013winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for\u00a0<\/em>The New York Times,\u00a0where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief. He previously worked overseas for\u00a0<\/em>The Dallas Morning News,\u00a0The Christian Science Monitor, and<\/em> NPR. He used to be the host of the Emmy Award-nominated <\/em>RT America show\u00a0<\/em>On Contact.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Go to Original – chrishedges.substack.com<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

10 Nov 2025 –\u00a0El Presidente Donald Trump is the gringo version of brutal and corrupt dictators foisted on Latin American countries by their oligarchs and Yankee imperialists.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":307313,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[3225,550,558,542,245,1126,1050,541,546,2137,1213,249,2841,70],"class_list":["post-307311","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anglo-america","tag-billionaires","tag-corruption","tag-dictatorship","tag-fascism","tag-fascist","tag-hegemony","tag-imperialism","tag-latin-america-caribbean","tag-oligarchy","tag-south-america","tag-super-rich","tag-trump","tag-tyranny","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307311","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=307311"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307311\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":307316,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307311\/revisions\/307316"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/307313"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=307311"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=307311"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=307311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}