Caracas Chronicles

Aphorisms are something I always found my mother to be good at, as are a lot of mothers.  A great one was “mediocrity has no political affiliation”—in its original Spanish, “los mediocres están en todo el espectro político”. She used to say that to talk about Venezuela, but not only Venezuela. It is undeniable that this is not the golden era of political leadership. However, mediocrity in politics is not our only problem: we all are witnessing a global boost of populist megalomaniac discourse and practices that announce democracy’s demise. 

And we Venezuelans, who already saw how our democracy demolished from within, must grapple with the fact that the White House is inhabited by an individual that is ringing our ears.

From renaming the world to changing your life

When the Gulf of Mexico became the topic of Donald Trump’s latest fixation, the news had a disturbingly familiar feel. We remembered the decision from Hugo Chávez to change Venezuela’s name to “Bolivarian Republic of” in the 1999 Constitution—an expensive measure disguised as a symbolic retribution, but ultimately an assertion of domination through symbolic violence. Perhaps paradoxical to Leftist theorists to invoke Pierre Bourdieu here, the chavista regime reshaped institutions to impose its ideological authority, reinforcing a power hierarchy over those considered part of an outdated elite. 

Many other similarities rained upon us in the following weeks. Trump ordered to ban from government texts an array of “woke words”, most notably “gay”, thus erasing LGBTQ and HIV resources from government websites. It was a charge against a glossary that Trumpism considers to discredit the hardships of the white working class. It reminds us of Chávez’s masterful manipulation of resentment, capitalizing on the Latin-American left’s history of questioning hegemonic discourses to manipulate the working class.

Both the MAGA and chavista electorates have been profoundly moved by anti-intellectual beliefs and resentment towards so-called elites—whether they be economic or political.

It is no longer out of bounds to imagine a Trump Presidency TV show where he will justify his decision to demand from the Federal Reserve “a little billion dollars”. In the same way that it is not hard for us to imagine Chávez coming up with a list of forbidden words that are representative of U.S. hegemony to ban them. A troubling feeling as a Venezuelan is that we must grapple with the tragi-comical dimension of seeing the free world fall to ploys we used to see as ridiculous.

In Venezuela, many people ruled out that Chávez was for real. With Trump, it is time to admit that he means business, that what he is doing against the rule of law and the oldest democracy of the Americas is way more than just “good TV”. Far from being something to laugh at, this is serious, and no one is safe.

Universal danger

Building the illusion that you are safe from a tyrant’s ire is a power strategy that requires time, patience and effort. Its goal is to distract you while a nation is being taken over. Who you think will bring justice and order, could perfectly mean injustice and chaos. Sometimes the leader tells a story of redemption and vengeance through a first presidency and failed insurgency. Sometimes he crafts it with a failed coup and a carefully upkept prisoner persona.

To believe that Trump—who allowed such a mockery of all judicial institutions and constitutional obligations—will spare you is the myth necessary for the making of a dictatorship. History proves that, under an autocracy, people that you think are totally different from you, and that are being persecuted for some official reason, might someday precede you in the victims’ list.

You may think that comparing Trump with Chávez is a bold take at first, but it is not so when we very casually look at recent developments and moves from the president of the United States. You have to admit there is an eerie parallel between Elon Musk’s frantic firing of civil servants on grounds of corruption for an abstract and intangible threat to the state, before replacing it with his own peers for his own personal gain, and Chávez’s televised firing of PDVSA executives in 2002. In a caricatural display of petulant and nihilistic understanding of far-right and far-left politics, one expels civil servants to privatize public service; the other claims to want to rid the state of plotters to employ individuals who are politically aligned with him but incompetent in critical tasks.

Big Brother and bully-in-chief

Paternalistic populism in its purest form would be my best attempt at synthesizing the Trump/Chávez duality. Fueled by the illusion of an electoral base united around long-standing collective grievances, it engages in the systematic dismantling of institutions, not an elaborate substantial and long-lived political reform, hinging on emotive discourses.

Both the MAGA and chavista electorates have been profoundly moved by anti-intellectual beliefs and resentment towards so-called elites—whether they be economic or political. Both Trump and Chávez embrace a profoundly anti-institutional behavior, pandering to conspiracy theorists that will motivate radical discourses while also seeking to transform said institutions to maximize their political power. 

Now, in the U.S., the canary has dropped dead, and to deny it is to give Trump and his power clique far too much time, with insufficient scrutiny and resistance

Characteristics of this paternalistic populism are a vulgar anti-intellectualism, overt contempt and repressive intentions towards the media, disregard for all and any institutional safeguarding, and a rejection of political debate based on premises of good faith and collective bettering. On one side, Trump aggressively talks down to the reporter he recognized in a press conference in 2020, attacking her career and person, patronizingly telling her to “be nice” and implying that she was threatening him. On the other, Chávez chose to discredit an entire foreign news-media organization by fixating on a reporter asking a legitimate question. 

Numerous NGOs and associations have promised to fight the Trump administration in court. From the ACLU taking on the case of Mahdmoud Khalil being illegally detained to community organizing to protect immigrants against ICE raids, the resistance is being set up. The Venezuelan-American population ought to bear in mind that while we might have an illusion of the United-States’ institutional safeguards as impenetrable and Trump’s lunatic personality as a quirk forgiven by his own power, the situation is no less dire than they were when Chávez was consolidating. And there are several events that prove it, from the dismantling of USAID and the Education Department, to the tariff war against the world, the astonishing foreign policy regarding Gaza and Ukraine, and the deportation of Venezuelan nationals to a maximum security jail in El Salvador against a judge’s order.

Those are just a few of many canaries in the mine, as are called the signs of bad things to happen after the old costume to release birds in a cave and see if they flew back or fell under an invisible toxic gas. When the Vargas Tragedy struck in 1999, while Chávez’s Constitution was voted, Venezuela had a glimpse of the state violence to come as the regime used a state of emergency to execute people in the state of Vargas (now named La Guaira). Now, in the U.S., the canary has dropped dead, and to deny it is to give Trump and his power clique far too much time, with insufficient scrutiny and resistance, to finish an extremist project that can transform the most powerful and rich country in the world into a post-truth dictatorship.