America is a Banana Republic - Read by Eunice Wong

This article is read by Eunice Wong, a Juilliard-trained actor, featured on Audible’s list of Best Women Narrators. Her work is on the annual Best Audiobooks lists of the New York Times, Audible, AudioFile, & Library Journal. www.eunicewong.actor

Text originally published November 10, 2025.

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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.

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 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.

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 s**t is denied, and everyone acts as though it does not exist,” adding that it is “a folding screen set up to curtain off death.”

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 in 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 Justice Department’s indictment of former Trump adviser John Bolton, New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI director James Comey, and the subpoenas served to former CIA director John Brennan, former FBI special agent Peter Strzok and former FBI 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 stadium to be named after himself. The 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 Ceaușescu — known as “the Mother of the Nation” — on Romanian state television during the reign of her husband, Nicolae Ceaușescu.

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.

Photos

President Rafael L. M. Trujillo Sitting at Desk

(Original Caption) Rafael L. M. Trujillo, the President of the Dominican Republic is shown in this photo.

President Trump Participates In White House Faith Office Luncheon

WASHINGTON, DC - JULY 14: U.S. President Donald Trump listens as Pastor Paula White-Cain, the head of the White House Faith Office, delivers remarks during a White House Faith Office luncheon in the State Dining Room at the White House on July 14, 2025 in Washington, DC. White-Cain hosted the luncheon with members of government and faith-based and community organizations. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

Portrait of Anastasio Somoza

(Original Caption) General Anastasio Somoza (left), President-elect of Nicaragua, talks to newsmen at Kennedy International Airport after his arrival to start a three-week goodwill visit to the United States. Somoza is a 1946 graduate of West Point Academy.

Francoise Duvalier Seated in Chair

(Original Caption) 3/18/1962-Port-Au-Prince, Haiti- In an exclusive UPI interview, President Francoise Duvalier (shown in 1959 file photo), of small, crowded Haiti, was asked how his image as a devoted country doctor had changed into a picture of him heading a repressive government which drove his opponents into exile, asylum or prison- in a word, dictatorship. He is shown seated, with his hand raised in a gesture.

Justin Trudeau

Waist up portrait of Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada, at the United Nations headquarters in New York City, New York, September 21, 2017. (Photo by EuropaNewswire/Gado/Getty Images)

Cuban Dictator Fidel Castro

Fidel Castro and his revolutionary army recently overthrew the government led by President Fulgencio Batista. (Photo by © Lester Cole/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)

US-TURKEY-DIPLOMACY-TRUMP-ERDOGAN

Gold colored ornaments and decor are seen as US President Donald Trump speaks during a meeting with Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC on September 25, 2025. (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP) (Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)

TOPSHOT-US-IRELAND-POLITICS-DIPLOMACY-TAOISEACH

TOPSHOT - A gold coaster reading “TRUMP” sits on the table in front of US President Donald Trump as he meets with Irish Prime Minister Micheal Martin in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, on March 12, 2025. (Photo by Mandel NGAN / AFP) (Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)

2024 Republican National Convention: Day 3

MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN - JULY 17: Former Acting Director of National Intelligence Ric Grenell speaks on stage on the third day of the Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum on July 17, 2024 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Milan Kundera, Czech Writer

PARIS, FRANCE - AUGUST 2: Czech Writer Milan Kundera poses during a portrait session on August 2,1984 in Paris,France. (Photo by Francois LOCHON/GAMMA/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

Rafael Trujillo

circa 1955: Rafael Leonidas Trujillo (1891 - 1961), Dictator of the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his death. (Photo by Archive Photos/Getty Images)

Donald Trump And Jeffrey Epstein Attend Victoria’s Secret Event

Businessman Donald Trump and financier Jeffrey Epstein attend a Victoria’s Secret Angels event sponsored by Rogers & Cowan at the club Duvet on 21st Street in New York City, New York on April 9, 1997. (Photo by Thomas Concordia/Getty Images)

John Bolton Joins NCRI-US Conference Examining Iran’s Nuclear Agenda

WASHINGTON, DC - AUGUST 17: Former National Security Adviser John Bolton speaks at a panel hosted by the National Council of Resistance of Iran – U.S. Representative Office (NCRI-US) at the Willard InterContinental Hotel on August 17, 2022 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

NY Attorney Gen. James Holds News Conference Before Hearing On Case To Protect Citizens From Musk’s DOGE Accessing Private Data

NEW YORK, NEW YORK - FEBRUARY 14: NY Attorney General Letitia James speaks during a press conference on the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) at Manhattan Federal Courthouse on February 14, 2025 in New York City. James was joined by Connecticut Attorney General William Tong for a press conference ahead of a scheduled court hearing as they discussed their ongoing lawsuit with 17 other state attorneys general to stop Elon Musk’s DOGE from accessing personal data housed in the Treasury Department. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

Former FBI Director James Comey Testifies Before House Judiciary Committee

WASHINGTON, DC - DECEMBER 07: Former Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey speaks to members of the media at the Rayburn House Office Building after testifying to the House Judiciary and Oversight and Government Reform committees on Capitol Hill December 07, 2018 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

House Intelligence Cmte Holds Hearing On Russian Interference In U.S. Election

WASHINGTON, DC - MAY 23: Former Director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) John Brennan testifies before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on Capitol Hill, May 23, 2017 in Washington, DC. Brennan is discussing the extent of Russia’s meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and possible ties to the campaign of President Donald Trump. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Former FBI Counterintelligence Division Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok Testifies At House Hearing On 2016 Election

WASHINGTON, DC - JULY 12: Deputy Assistant FBI Director Peter Strzok testifies before a joint committee hearing of the House Judiciary and Oversight and Government Reform committees in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill July 12, 2018 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

US-POLITICS-INVESTIGATION-FBI-PAGE

Lisa Page, former legal counsel to former FBI Director Andrew Mc Cabe, arrives on Capitol Hill July 13, 2018 to provide closed-door testimony about the texts critical of Donald Trump that she exchanged with her FBI agent lover during the 2016 presidential campaign. (Photo credit should read ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images)

US-POLITICS-TRUMP-BANNER-AGRICULTURE

A banner showing an image of US President Donald Trump hangs on the side of a US Department of Agriculture building in Washington, DC, on May 16, 2025. The banner was put up to mark the the 163rd anniversary of the Department of Agriculture which was founded on May 15, 1862 by Abraham Lincoln. (Photo by Mandel NGAN / AFP) (Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)

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