By Atilio Borón on January 17, 2025
Protest against Trump in Oakland CA, January 20, 2017, photo: Bill Hackwell
On Monday, January 20, 2025, Donald John Trump will be sworn in as the 47th president of the United States. There is a curious parallel that I cannot overlook: Trump, like Che, was born on June 14. In the tycoon’s case, 1946; Che in 1928. Of course, that’s where the similarities end. Trump is a sort of ultra-conservative “Rambo” -but a protectionist, much to Javier Milei’s chagrin- who has taken upon himself the mission of making the United States recover its world primacy as an empire. “To achieve peace by force” is one of the favorite phrases of his advisors in order to regain the predominance that the United States has retained since the end of World War II.
Che, on the other hand, was one of the greatest anti-imperialist fighters in history and a man of unsurpassed personal and political integrity. The New Yorker, on the other hand, is his perfect antithesis: a corrupt businessman to the core, an expert in fabricating bankruptcies and swindling naïve investors, and an incurable aficionado of sex renting and drug use. He arrives at the White House, to the eternal disgrace of his nation, having been found guilty of committing 34 crimes of various orders. A minimum sentence of four years in prison and a millionaire’s compensation was imposed. But in a display of disrespect for the law, the Manhattan judge, Juan M. Merchan, decided to forget about both and refrained from executing the sentence, thus enabling Trump’s entry into the White House. Those who remember remember that he is the first proven and sanctioned criminal to become president of the United States, a fact that eloquently demonstrates the depth of the process of putrefaction of the political and judicial order of that country.
Different time
The person who returns to the Oval Office is eight years older, a few months away from his 79th birthday. If before, in his first term (2017-2021), he was characterized by his arrogance, his disdain for dialogue and his racism, such traits became more pronounced as he aged. Already at the time he described some Latin American countries as “shit holes” and migrants as thieves, drug traffickers and rapists. Although it may seem impossible, today he has escalated this verbal virulence by preparing the ideological climate for the expulsion of millions of undocumented immigrants, something that, if carried out even to a minimal extent, would provoke a humanitarian crisis of enormous proportions.
But in addition to the risk that Trump could run the fate of Joe Biden and his senility, there is another element that makes his return to the White House much more dangerous: the cast that constitutes his first circle of advisors and executors of his policies is made up of aggressive hawks especially interested in precipitating a “regime change” in countries like Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, and also in harassing China by manipulating Taiwan, in addition to being determined supporters of the policies of Zionism in Palestine. There are two key names in this murky environment: the future Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, and the Special Envoy for Latin America, Mauricio Claver-Carone. Both were born in Florida and are representatives of the anti-Castro mafia that, using the worst methods, dominates the politics of that crucial “swing state” whose votes can decide an election, as they did in 2000. On that occasion, the Democratic candidate Al Gore was the winner by popular vote on a national scale, but lost in the state of Florida where the judges, after a couple of months of examining a handful of votes and records of the districts with a majority of African Americans in that state, ruled that George Bush (Jr.) had won in Florida.
George’s brother, “Jeb”, happened to be governor of that state. With this background, little good can be expected from the Rubio-Claver Carone duo, born and raised in that mafia environment. It is known that Rubio has been dreaming for years of a repeat of the Bay of Pigs invasion and that Trump is enthusiastic about the idea of fighting drug trafficking in Mexico by bombing its territorial enclaves, especially in Sinaloa, with drones. But the world has changed a lot since Trump’s first presidency and today multi polarity is a stony reality. There are new and very powerful reconfigurations of power on an international scale – BRICS is just one of them – and the United States will not be able to do whatever Trump wants. That is why it seems unlikely that his inflammatory verbiage can be translated into concrete and lasting actions, beyond a few spectacular gestures. In any case, in a few weeks we will be able to test these hypotheses. In the meantime, the voice of order in Latin America and the Caribbean should be: “Be on guard!
Source: Resumen en Cuba