American democracy continues to darken in the shadow of Donald Trump’s ego. The New York magnate is converting the system with which the United States was born into an “egocracy”: the system where cratos (power) is concentrated in the delusional egomania of an autocratic, if not openly tyrannical, leader.
He is the first president to claim a Nobel Peace Prize because he considers himself worthy of that Nordic distinction. However, it cannot display achieved pacifications, but rather interference with threats and pressure to sign improvised truces that do not become true peace agreements.
The agreement signed by Cambodia and Thailand was shown as a trophy, but the armies of both countries soon clashed again on the long border drawn by the French and blurred in the area surrounding the Preah Vihear temple and the Emerald Triangle, which also borders Laos.
He then announced as his own achievement an agreement that he had the M-23 guerrilla and the governments of Rwanda and Congo sign, but the guns roared again as soon as the Western media cameras that had gone to cover “the peace achieved by Trump” left the province of North Kivu. It achieved a permanent violated truce in Gaza, while allowing Netanyahu’s government to promote new settlements in the West Bank and encourage violent acts by Israeli settlers against inhabitants of that Palestinian territory.
He attacked alleged Boko Haram bases in Nigeria with missiles from ships stationed in the Gulf of Guinea, accusing that jihadist organization of massacring Christians in the African country. But it says or does nothing about the rivers of blood that the war between the army of General Abdelfattah al-Burham and its former allies Rapid Support Forces, commanded by General Mohamed Dagalo, is causing to flow in Sudan. Trump perceives himself as a world peacekeeper while ignoring the bloodiest of the ongoing wars and rewarding Vladimir Putin’s warlike expansionism by handing over Ukraine and leaving Europe under the shadow of Russia.
Meanwhile, he begins another practice that shows the dimension of his ego. It should generate a widespread repudiation that has pushed the name of John F. Kennedy to make a place for his, in the name of the cultural center created 60 years ago in Washington in tribute to the president assassinated a year before.
Regarding the few indignant voices that were heard, the sycophants who surround Mar-a-Lago, in addition to millions of followers of the president, point out that it is the noise of “the communists of the Democratic Party.” In short, say the justifiers, who does it hurt that Trump has removed the name of John F. Kennedy to make a place for his own name on the door of a historic cultural center? The answer is: American democracy.
The personalist cult begins drip-feed in the open society, where the rule of law prevails. If you find a sleepy population, you move forward. It does so slowly in societies with solid democratic cultures, and authoritarian political cultures gravitate quickly.
It is grotesque that, imitating super-rock bands, he has inscribed the surname TRUMP on the fuselage of his private plane. Even more grotesque is that the famous cultural space that was always called the Kennedy Center, now displays its new name in giant letters: Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Center.
It is the only way in which the names of two leaders who are at the opposite end of the spectrum can be brought closer together. Kennedy was the supporter of Martin Luther King in the fight for the civil rights of the African-American population and also the reinforcement of the welfare state, among other things, while Trump is a conservative with racist impulses, as well as an autocrat in the making who is piercing North American democracy to turn it into a personalist regime.
That Trump’s name has been incorporated into that of a historic cultural center in Washington by decision of the president, who to achieve this appointed his fans to the board that manages it and violated the law that Congress passed in 1964 by creating that entity and calling it that way, is one more sign of the hyper-personalist drift that pushes the United States towards an “egocracy.”
Trump is beginning to resemble Central Asian despots like the Turkmen Saparmyrat Niyasov, who reigned for almost half a century with excessive powers, plagued the country with statues of him and called himself “Turkmenbashi”: father of the Turkmens.
For almost two full decades, Kazakhstan was ruled by the despotic Nursultan Nazarbayev, who moved the capital from Almaty to Astana, which he removed from its historical name to give it his own name. And only when he left power and his successors decided to detach themselves from their heritage of delusional personalism, the capital stopped being called Nur-Sultan and became Astana again. The greatest example of personalistic totalitarianism is in the regime that Kim Il Sung created in North Korea, where he imposed the Juche doctrine as a religion that glorifies him.
The Arab version of outlandish personalism includes the Syrian Hafez Assad, his son Bashar, the Iraqi Saddam Hussein and the Egyptian Hosni Mubarak, among others. Latin American examples come from the 20th century and the Paraguayan Alfredo Stroessner stands out, who renamed Ciudad del Este calling it Puerto Stroessner, and the Dominican Rafael Trujillo, who renamed the historic Dominican capital: Santo Domingo as Ciudad Trujillo.
That political darkness that had been shown as a sin of the times with Perón’s first governments, insinuated itself again in Argentina when, with Néstor Kirchner recently deceased, many squares, hospitals, cultural centers, hydroelectric dams, gas pipelines and other things were renamed after the former president whose wife was governing.
In the United States, from George Washington to Joe Biden, heads of state at the end of their mandate created a foundation or a library under their name. No one baptized anything with his own name while he held the presidency. That political culture predominated in North American history, until Donald John Trump and his enormous ego took up residence in the Oval Office.
