One increased the fortune he inherited from his father and aged mocking the decrepitude of his rival, the other made his old age a master class of austerity and simplicity.
His contrasting images crossed in the same handful of days, such as the “rich man” and the “poor man” crossed in the title of Irwin Shaw’s novel. One looks his last name in luxurious skyscrapers and in his Boeing 757, the other wore a Vetusto Volkswagen Beetle and a three -legged bitch in his desprolija Chacra on the outskirts of Montevideo.
José “Pepe” Mujica made a review of his violent youth that rose in arms against a democracy, and aged adding his contribution to the remarkable democratic culture of Uruguay, leaving as a last postcard a funeral massive and the respect expressed by rulers around the world.
Donald Trump remained without self-criticism from his self-elogy cataract, but on his last tour he acted as guided by a corrective review.
Luxurious salons of imposing palaces are a daily landscape for a billionaire who also presides over the greatest world power. But in the lavish rooms of the rich Gulf monarchies, although in his usual landscape, the New York tycoon looked different.
Perhaps aware of his fallibility for the succession of bad calculations that led him to uncomfort His pathological egolatry.
The hug with Mohamed Bin Salmán, despite the murder and dismembered of Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Consulate of Istanbul, was preceded by the handshake that Joe Biden had to give the son of King Salmán Bin Abdulaziz to the Saud despite the brutal crime of that dissident that resided in the United States.
Initially, Biden had strongly denounced the murder of Khashoggi, trying to isolate the prince of the bloody hands. However, reality imposed on him to turn his position. But the Democratic president touched the anti-Iraní stage of Mohamed Bin Salmán, while Trump shaken the prince’s hand that China reconciled with the Combative Persian theocracy.
The waters of the Middle East are revolts and in them the young Saudi leader can get along with the Ayatolas regime and also with the former Jihadist of Al Qaeda who knocked Bashar to the Asad, the ally of Iran in Syria.
The strange thing was to see an American president to strengthen his hand and praise a member of the terrorist organization who launched passengers against the twin towers and the Pentagon, who also fought at the orders of Aymán to Zawahiri against US troops in Iraq.
Ahmed Al Sharaa is today the president of Syria but before it was Abú Muhamad to Juni, his jihadist name as commander of the Front Nusra, Al Qaeda’s arm in the civil war that ended up demolishing the dynasty to the Asad in Damascus. That is why the handshake was shocking and Trump’s praise to the jihadista who in Iraq played football kicked kicking US soldiers.
As a “attractive young man with a strong past, a fighter,” the United States president described to the Syrian leader. Although that approach, until recently inconceivable, it can be successful for a positive redesign of the Middle East board, the striking praise that Trump dispensed was excessive and expendable. In fact, Europe had already accepted it without Macron or Starmer to flatter it and not even put a single adjective of more. In short, if it is adjectives, the Syrian leader who was part of Al Qaeda also has “bloodthirsty.”
Equally strange were the images of the Chief of the White House in the Palacio de la Dinstía al Thani, receiving a very excessive gift: a Boeing 747 jumbo valued at 400 million dollars.
Accepting such a gift, Trump violated the law that prohibits US presidents from receiving gifts from kings and foreign states. But more weird it was to see it to the hugs with Tamim Bin Hammad Al Thani, the emir of Qatar who has been financing Hamas’s power for years in the Gaza Strip and giving refuge in luxurious skyscrapers of Doha to political leaders of that terrorist organization that is at war with Israel, including Ismail Haniye.
When Riad and Abu Dabi had Tehran as the main enemy, Doha maintained the proximity to the Islamic Republic of Iran, which earned him a long blockade of his Arab neighbors. Now, Trump’s effusive approach to Qatar shows postcards that must have baffled Netanyahu.
As he ended up showing tiredness with the bombings of the Russian leader on Ukrainian civilians who made it impossible for the truce that he had driven, the American president also seems angry with the war of land razed with which the Israeli premier buried the truce driven from Washington.
By the way, Trump’s latest attitudes do not imply breaking with Putin and Netanyahu, two leaders with whom he shares an expansionist vocation and a hard conservatism of an autocratic nature, although unlike Russia, in Israel and the United States govern states of law that were not yet bent by that authoritarian instinct.
At the moment, the visible thing is the contrast between the images of the New York tycoon in the phase halls of the Arab monarchs and the images that went around the world from that small and discreet country that has a rich democracy in dialogue and coexistence: Uruguay.
In a time when power and money are idolized, being austere is an act of rebellion and being an old man and simple is a form of resistance.
Those were the best rebellion and the most valuable resistance that José Mujica embodied. They seem less insumisas than having taken arms in their youth, but it is not so. The greatest contribution of that former president who became a Democrat, was to make his old age a master class for austerity and simplicity.
