“We’re going to take down these sons of bitches,” Trump promised a couple of days ago, referring to the drug trafficking gangs allegedly operating from Venezuela, protected or covered up by Nicolás Maduro’s regime. It seems that, as his popularity declines, the US president is hardening his already typically crude and vulgar language. He has recently also referred to Somalia, the immigrants arriving in the United States from this African country, and Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, also of Somali origin, as “scum.” Trump’s knack for revealing his true colors through the insults he hurls is remarkable. In any case, it’s clear that he and his advisors believe he can bolster his image by using this barrack-room rhetoric. They may very well be right.
For once, Spanish Trump supporters have beaten their admired American role model to the punch, and it's been quite some time since the president of the Community of Madrid called the Spanish prime minister a son of a bitch in a parliamentary session; later she claimed to have said she liked fruit and turned that imbecility into an irritant word of war which the Spanish right still repeats left and right today. This insult is often a tactic, a dramatic gesture, used by particularly disastrous leaders. For example, Rodrigo Duterte, the president who denied the existence of the Philippines amidst a bloodbath and police terrorism, also under the pretext of fighting drug trafficking, and who called another American president, Barack Obama, a son of a bitch, as the first thing he said on the day of a summit between the two leaders that never took place. But perhaps the most famous phrase in American politics using this expression to denigrate the mothers of opponents is the one uttered by Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State under Nixon and Ford, about the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet: "Yes, he's a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch." That it was "his" was true: by preaching pragmatism, Kissinger ended up with a broken hand orchestrating coups in Latin American countries to install military dictatorships as bloodthirsty toward their citizens as they were subservient to US interests. Despite this, or perhaps precisely because of it, Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973, a prize that Trump covets.
Maduro is not the Trump administration's son of a bitch, which is why the US president now wants to eliminate the Venezuelan once and for all, with uncertain consequences for a world order already quite destabilized by Ukraine and Palestine. North American imperialist intervention in South America is, today as yesterday, deplorable. So too is the leniency with which a segment of the left regards dictatorial regimes like Maduro's, turning them into "leftist" icons. Progressivism, the defense of rights and freedoms, is incompatible with admiration for dictatorial regimes, however revolutionary they may claim to be.
