Why I Don’t Like Donald Trump

US President Donald Trump (Reuters)

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Carlos Alberto Montaner, 4 October 2020

To my friend, the writer Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

I don’t like Trump, first of all, because I don’t like his character as an arrogant and oppressive person (a bully) who lies or exaggerates. “Trumpologists” estimate that he has said more than twenty thousand lies, deformations of reality or “post-truths.”

I don’t like Trump because in a civilized debate you don’t constantly interrupt or shout at your adversary but contribute ideas. The first debate with Biden was an embarrassing circus. Those are not proper gestures or messages of a president of the United States who is, inevitably, a modeler of behavior, especially for young people.

I don’t like Trump because one does not badly mistreat NATO allies, starting with Angela Merkel, the leader of Germany and perhaps Europe, and following with Dusko Markovic, Prime Minister of Montenegro, whom he treacherously and blatantly pushed and then he did not apologize; or Mette Frederiksen, the Prime Minister of Denmark, who refused to consider selling Greenland to the US and Trump replied by cancelling a scheduled trip to Copenhagen.

I do not like Trump, because he is undoing the good relations of the United States with its best allies, such as France and Australia, probably because of his rude New York customs of a developer without “class.” With Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, he had an unnecessary run-in when the Frenchman questioned the current course of NATO under the erratic leadership of the American. With Malcolm Turnbull, Prime Minister of Australia, he was worse: he hung up the phone when Turnbull demanded that he fulfill the commitment established by the previous president, Barack Obama, to accept a group of Syrian refugees. It was a commitment from the USA, not from the person who temporarily occupied the White House. Australia sent troops to the two world wars, to Korea to Vietnam and even to Afghanistan and Iraq.

I don’t like Trump because as despotic as he is with his allies, he is the opposite when it comes to Vladimir Putin’s Russia or Kim Jong-un’s North Korea. I firmly believe, as the FBI suspects, that the Russians can blackmail him, not only with the mediation authorized by Trump in the 2016 and 2020 elections (perhaps negotiated by Paul Manafort), but because of the lewd “golden shower” that he allegedly requested of two prostitutes on the bed in which Barack Obama had slept during an official visit to Moscow.

I don’t like Trump because he does not respect science and scientists, as shown in the management of the Covid-19 crisis by not wearing a mask, making fun of Biden for wearing one, and publicly recommending absurd remedies, which I hope he does not consider, because I wish him well, now that he and his wife have been diagnosed with the coronavirus. Likewise, this anti-scientific attitude is manifested in the treatment given to climate change and in believing that the result of all actions is measured in dollars and cents. This, simply, is not true.

I don’t like Trump because I am a Hispanic immigrant in the USA and he rejects us. It is not true that a good part of the Mexicans who cross the border are drug traffickers or rapists. They are usually Mexican and Central American peasants who cannot earn a living in their countries, or who are threatened with death by criminal gangs, attracted by the labor structures that they observe on the American side. They do the jobs that almost no one wants to do in the United States, and they contribute their work to keeping the country at the top of the planet.

I don’t like Trump, because the President doesn’t even feel empathy for the “Dreamers” and doesn’t want to grant them residency. This is about 800,000 sociological Americans who were brought to the United States by their parents and who are in immigration limbo. These young people have no other identity than an American one. In many cases they don’t even speak Spanish. (If Trump had been in the White House in the 1960s, Cuban refugees would not have been welcomed in the United States).

It is true that there are immigration laws, and that ever country must control its border, but these children were brought without their consent. There is a thing called “amnesty” which, previously, had been used by other presidents, like Ronald Reagan, and that have resolved the lives of these undocumented immigrants. Especially when we know that 63% of Americans (much better than their president) agree to open their arms to these “dreamers.”

I don’t like Trump because he does not grant a residence permit to Venezuelans or Nicaraguans knowing that the dictatorships of Maduro and Ortega are unforgiving towards Venezuelans and Nicaraguans.

I don’t like Trump because he did not annul Obama’s presidential decrees regarding Cuban family reunification, or the special program that admitted into the US “slaves in white coats,” the medical personnel “hired” by governments insensitive to the pain of others; or the measure of “wet foot-dry foot” measure that gave access to the persecuted who presented themselves to the US authorities.

I don’t like Trump because an American president must be absolutely spotless in his obligations to the Treasury, and the New York Times investigation showed that Trump was not. It also proved what the NY businessmen said sotto voce: he had failed as a businessman. He failed as a casino owner. He failed as a university entrepreneur. He failed as a otel owner. Instead, he was successful marketing himself on an NBC TV show that ran for years and earned more than 400 million dollars.

Last, I don’t like Trump, because I think nationalism is the origin of wars and the limitations of international commerce. Because I believe that the primary function of a Head of State is to unite society and it seems to me that we are facing a racist and white supremacist of the worst kind, as opined by Mary L. Trump, the President’s niece and a notable clinical psychologist in her book Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.

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Nota bene. Many years ago, I joined the ranks of the “independents” in the United States. Sometimes I have voted for Democrats and sometimes for Republicans. I would have loved it if the Republican candidate had been Jeb Bush, but he did not survive the primaries.

Fortunately for the record, I said it clearly in an article published in the NYT on October 13, 2014 ( Cuba Doesn’t Deserve Normal Diplomatic Relations). I did not like Obama’s break with the tradition of 10 presidents before him, Republicans and Democrats, of not making excessive concessions to the Cuban dictatorship as long as the Castros did not show a clear sign of amendment and did not embark on the road to democracy.

I didn’t like it at all because I don’t like being lied to, and Obama assured a thousand times that there would be no normal diplomatic relations until the island respected human rights, while his political operators secretly managed otherwise. Outcome? More repression within Cuba, a greater presence of Cuban intelligence in Venezuela and even the clandestine shipment of weapons and a plane to North Korea, violating all the agreements of the United Nations.

As a good liberal (in the European sense of the term), I usually endorse a combination between the conservative in fiscal matters (a limited state, a market and not a planned economy,  the least amount of taxes and public debt), and the American “liberal” in social matters (pro-choice, pro-immigration, and a state sufficiently secular to  comfortably accommodate agnostics).

On the other hand, I have lived 40 years in Europe and, previously, 18 years in Cuba, so I know first-hand the difference between a “Welfare State,” with its defects and its virtues, and a disgusting Communist dictatorship. No one is going to convince me that asking for health and education to be paid for through general budgets, as is the case in Scandinavian countries, and, to some extent, in Germany and Switzerland, is a symptom of totalitarianism. Perhaps it is a mistake, but that has nothing to do with the dictatorship of the proletariat advocated by Marx to set up his maddened and impoverishing scheme.

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