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