Every dictatorship 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.
El Dookie – by Mr. Fish.
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.
ICE agents on top of the Broadview ICE Detention Center in Chicago on Sept. 9. (Paul Goyette /Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY 4.0)
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 for Sale Here’
Elon Musk with Trump and a Tesla outside the White House in March. (White House/Flickr)
“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.
Wallowing in Kitsch
Donald and First Lady Melania Trump hosting a Halloween event at the White House on Oct. 30. (White House/Daniel Torok)
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.”
Epstein & Trump
Best Friends Forever statue, protest art put up anonymously in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 23 and removed days later by the U.S. Parks Department. (Joe Flood /Wikimedia Commons/CC BY 4.0)
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 on 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 U.S. Justice Department’s indictment of former Trump adviser John Bolton, New York Attorney General Letitia James and former F.B.I. director James Comey, and the subpoenas served to former C.I.A. Director John Brennan, former F.B.I. special agent Peter Strzok and former F.B.I. 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 football stadium to be named after himself. The U.S. 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 Ceausescu — known as “the Mother of the Nation” — on Romanian state television during the reign of her husband, Nicolae Ceausescu.
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.”
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR. He is the host of the TV show The Chris Hedges Report.
This article is from Scheerpost.
NOTE TO READERS: There is now no way left for me to continue to write a weekly column for ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show without your help. The walls are closing in, with startling rapidity, on independent journalism, with the elites, including the Democratic Party elites, clamoring for more and more censorship. Please, if you can, sign up at chrishedges.substack.com so I can continue to post my Monday column on ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show, “The Chris Hedges Report.”
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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One small correction : “L’ ètat et l’argent, c’est moi” in Trump’s unique case !
Chris,
Explain this to Jimmy Dore.
“The Banana Republic of the United States” fell into “The Gap” & the “Old Navy” is M.I.A. “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.” Beginning w/The Trumps’ “Tower of Gauche,” the WH, pictured, above; AND, the portrait of “El Dookie”, by Mr. Fish, is a sfo depiction of The Donald “très gauche” Trump w/his FLOTUS “button” pinned to his chest. “The Donald” is a crude, rude, socially gauche & grotesque creature. A 2-Term POTUS, like Obama, armed & dangerous. A vengeful, warmongering POTUS frantically “building dams NOT bridges.”
Chris Hedges’ reading the tea leaves, is sfo, “This culture of vengeance calcifies civic and political life;” AND, John W. Whitehead “serves-up” Exhibit A-Z, *“Rule by Brute Force: The True Nature of Government.” JANUARY 31, 2017:
* “The torch has been passed to a new president. All of the imperial powers amassed by Barack Obama & George W. Bush—to kill American citizens without due process, to detain suspects indefinitely, to strip Americans of their citizenship rights, to carry out mass surveillance on Americans without probable cause, to suspend laws during wartime, to disregard laws with which he might disagree, to conduct secret wars and convene secret courts, to sanction torture, to sidestep the legislatures and courts with executive orders and signing statements, to direct the military to operate beyond the reach of the law, to act as a dictator and a tyrant, above the law and beyond any real accountability—have been inherited by Donald Trump. “ John W. Whitehead.
The owl asks, “WHO’S to blame?” WHO will hold accountable “our” home-grown Dictators? “After all, President Trump didn’t create the police state. He merely inherited it” from Clinton-Gore, Bush-Cheney, Obama-Biden, Trump-Pence, Biden-Harris. The bird tweets, “BLAME the Republicans & Democrats who justified, 1) every power grab, 2) every expansion of presidential powers, 3) every attack on the Constitution as long as it was a member of their own party leading the charge. BLAME Congress for being a weak, inept body that spends more time running for office & pandering to the interests of the monied elite than representing the citizenry. BLAME the courts for caring more about order than justice; &, for failing to hold government officials accountable to the rule of law. BLAME Corporate America for taking control of the government and calling the shots behind the scenes.” John W. Whitehead @ *https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/rule_by_brute_force_the_true_nature_of_government
“Dictators vainly seek what they cannot achieve: immortality. They flood their countries with images of themselves to ward off death.” Chris Hedges. HENCE, DJ “The, bloody-orange, Snowman Cometh,” attempting “to preserve himself by extracting the anti-melting gene of a human being. HENCE, “The Snowman’s Revenge,” Trump-Vance, Inc., create a “Cold Finger” – a finger shaped device that can shoot freeze rays & indefinite blasts of snow & ice. Forging a new, icy kingdom, “The West Pole”, a “Tower of Gauche.” FORE! hxxps://courage.fandom.com/wiki/Snowman
TY, Chris Hedges, Mr. Fish, John W. Whitehead, CN, et al., “Onward & Upwards”
BLAME:
Greed and power.
(And while we’re at it, ineptitude.)
That is why secular society removes the benediction of false gods that religion was created for until they took over from the Pharaohs instead. Then with Rome it became a way to steal and weaponize a religion to defame resistance to occupation. Now weaponizing religions for proxy wars and profit motives is all the rage at our present stage even between Orthodox visions..
In a sane world would this would be considered an AI hallucination ?
or
Count Dracula dressed like a saint, knocking door to door, handing out posion candy blood suckers, every night but halloween ?
I can’t wait until I don’t see Santa in AI red on Xmas mourn .
Another great, well-written, comprehensive commentary by Chris Hedges. But there is one passage I have a problem with, which, at first glance might be considered nit-picking, but is actually of overriding importance.
I am referring to the paragraph on the Justice Department’s pursuit of Bolton, Comey, Brennan et al. While undoubtedly, these indictments and subpoenas are motivated by Trump’s revenge, there are also legitimate, legal reasons for the pursuit of Comey, Brennan, Strzok and Page. (Not James, and I don’t know about Bolton, whom. I despise, but not sure he did anything illegal.) With each of these four individuals, there is enough evidence – some by their own admission (be careful what you say in a memoir) of egregious wrongdoing, i.e. attempting to overturn the results of a presidential election, and they deserve to be held accountable, regardless of the Trump revenge motive.
I think the Epstein thing is gonna do away with Trump or emasculate him if he chooses to try to stay-things just keep coming out. Meanwhile JD Vance appears to be trying to woo MAGA and consolidate power-have not verified that Miller has set up a 30,000 man force to “quell” and uprisings or civil unrest along with his ICE goons. It has occurred to me that some of Trump’s people could even be behind the slow trickle of Epstein evidence because he’s so stupid, borderline demented and thus unpredictable (today I read there was an email between Epstein and Maxwell seeming to confirm that Trump knew and participated). Quietly, there is a case being brought by a victim asking for Epstein’s financial records since a billion or more moved through his hands and Epstein was in no way a successful businessman. My guess is that the biggest secret is that trump, who’s casinos had just failed was ap partner w/ JE and was able to glom onto some of the money Epstein was pulling in from blackmail and perhaps payments from Mossad and the CIA. if we end up w/ Vance as president I don’t think the new reality will be tin pot dictator. likely something much scarier
It would be nice if Trump’s oft-noted parallels to Latin America’s assortment of caudillos and populist leaders (for example, see Michael Luhnow, “Latin America Worries About ‘Trumpismo’,” The Wall Street Journal, Mar. 18, 2016; Michael Reid (“Bello”), “A Peronist on the Potomac,” The Economist, Feb. 16, 2017; Cardiff Garcia, “Donald Trump: Peronist? A Chat with Sebastian Edwards on Populist Economics,” Financial Times (FT), Mar. 13, 2017; Carlos de la Torre, “Trump’s Populism: Lessons From Latin America,” Postcolonial Studies 20, no. 2 (2017): 187-198; Federico Finchelstein, “Trumpism is Spreading in Latin America,” The Washington Post, Sep. 18, 2018; and Jared P. Van Ramshorst, “Anti-Immigrant Sentiment, Rising Populism, and the Oaxacan Trump,” Journal of Latin American Geography 17, no. 1 (2018): 253-256) would more consistently work toward better ingratiating him to his counterparts in the region, rather than mostly bringing out his worst Trujilloian (or at least Bukelean) excesses. Certainly, it would be nice to see more along the lines of the productive (if still turbulent) relationships that he has cultivated with the likes of AMLO and his successor Claudia Sheinbaum (Luis F. Carrasco, “Despite Insults, Praise, and Much In Between, Mexico Keeps Finding Ways to Work with Trump,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, Nov. 9, 2025) in Mexico (against my initial forecasting expectations regarding a Trump-AMLO relationship back in early 2017), and most recently Lula in Brazil (Stephen Quillen, “Trump Meets Brazil’s Lula at ASEAN Summit, Touts ‘Pretty Good Deals’,” Al Jazeera, Oct. 26, 2025), alongside his fleeting displays of reciprocal magnanimity on a “worthy adversary” basis with Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela (Anya Parampil, “Corporate Coup Assassination Excerpt: Venezuela’s Maduro on John Bolton’s Plot to Kill Him,” The Grayzone, July 16, 2024).
As a separate aside, it is a shame that Luis Llosa’s 2005 film adaptation of Mario Vargas Llosa’s “La fiesta del chivo” (“The Feast of the Goat”) has not gotten more exposure, as it is truly one of the more underrated dramatizations of life under Latin American dictaorship that could easily have much more mainstream appeal, particularly in a post-#MeToo/Savile/Cosby/Epstein/Diddy era (some of the versions that are readily available online lack English-language subtitles or performances, unlike the one that I am fortunate enough to have on DVD, despite my own understanding of Spanish), but the translated novel itself is superb on its own merits.
Thanks for the info on the Llosa book/film. It’s difficult to find the film in it’s original language of english. But the book translation can be downloaded here:
Xxxx://vdoc.pub/download/the-feast-of-the-goat-19mi0u43ijdo
And the complete film (dubbed into Spanish with no subtitles) is here:
Xxxx://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6efEKPrmeCo
If anyone else is interested.
Wonderful cartoon Mr. Fish. Especially liked the dollar swastika.
Thank you Chris, you write: “…Dictators wallow in kitsch…” and so does Jeff Koons, reimagine his Banality [of Evil] series of Michael Jackson and Bubbles w/ Epstein as Bubbles to Trumps childlike Michael Jackson and ‘shake the globe’.
“Exploit the Masses” and “Banality as Savior”
Page 360 of ‘Nobody’s Girl’ by Virginia Roberts Guiffre:
“…One of those men’s names has come up repeatedly in various court filings, and in response, he has told my lawyers that if I talk about him publicly, he will employ his vast resources to keep me in court for the rest of my life…”