I just turned 77, and my wife, a Brooklyn native, and I'm considering leaving the United States for good, where I arrived 53 years ago in 1972. There had already been a first departure in 1967 to Paris, where I spent two years. But America was a different story; it was a matter of personal survival. I wasn't going to bury myself alive in a country, Spain, that was literally the arse end of Europe, controlled by a fascist dictatorship that couldn't be seen ending, not even with Franco's death, one day. I left because I wanted to; I wasn't being pursued by the social police or the TOP (Spanish Workers' Party). I didn't have to cross the Pyrenees in the winter of 1939 with Franco's troops on my heels, far from it. I left by plane, but with only the clothes on my back and no intention of returning. And then a lifetime passed.
Well, if I left Spain then for reasons conditioned by the political circumstances of the moment, now I find myself in the position of leaving the United States, my adopted country of which I am a citizen, for very similar reasons and at an age when most people have already been retired for twelve years. This would not happen, obviously, without Donald Trump and the neutron bomb of his presidency.
Trump is the chicken, maniac version of orthodox fascism, which is saying something. German National Socialism, Italian Fascism, or Joseantonian Falangism were ideologies, delirious ones, but ideologies. Trumpism is not; it has nothing that needs to be intellectually processed. Its logic is that of a bar thug, namely, if you punch someone in the face, they won't bother you again; everyone has a price; If you meet another like you (Putin), don't challenge him, pay him, ally with him as long as it serves you, and when you can, take him out; no one is more important than you, not your friends, not your family; lie, lie, lie; attack, attack, attack, as Roy Cohn, his youthful mentor and lieutenant of the communist-hunting Senator Joe McCarthy, advised him. From those powders... The only intellectual luster of Trumpism without Trump is provided by the fundamentalist Catholic Steve Bannon, perhaps the only neo-fascist who has read Gramsci and realized that the great battlefield where things will ultimately be decided is that of culture.
The combination of his absolute mediocrity combined with his infantile narcissism means that he surrounds himself with even more imbecile characters than he is so that they do not overshadow him. Bogus figures like Marco Rubio, Secretary of State; Pete Hegseth, the alcoholic Secretary of Defense; Pam Bondi, the Attorney General; and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the anti-vaccine Secretary of Health, are good examples of this way of living in an imaginary world of golden glitter. Although there are cases that escape this logic. The entente with Elon Musk was a temporary pact between vulgar brawlers. Vance is the real radioactive danger and the future executor of the Heritage Foundation's famous 2025 program, designed to turn the United States into a far-right dystopia. Meanwhile, what Donald wants is to hit where it hurts what he identifies as the posh, well-off progressive class represented by elite universities and their luxury students, like Barack Obama, for example, whom he hates with a passion. But there's more. Trump has ordered a change to the "biased and leftist" exhibition narratives of national museums in Washington, such as the Museum of American History, the Museum of African American Culture, and the Museum of Native American Nations, both under the Smithsonian, and that's just the beginning. Some museums are already self-censoring to preemptively avoid problems or under pressure from within their boards. A few days ago, I learned that the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, a museum I have always been very close to, had temporarily suspended its prestigious Independent Study Program and fired its associate director, the Catalan philosopher Sara Nadal-Melsió, due to accusations of antisemitism related to student projects dealing with the Palestinian genocide. We are in an open and declared cultural war, let no one be fooled.
Add to this the revocation of the constitutional right to nationality by birth, which opens the door to cases of acquired nationality, like mine, who get into trouble with their opinions or open their mouths where and when it's not convenient, and add to it all the irregular arrests of Latinos just for being Latinos throughout the country at the hands of the paramilitary forces of ICE (incentivized with a cash bonus for arrest!), and we have a surreal situation that is easily recognizable as something very familiar to any Spanish person old enough to have lived through the Franco dictatorship. It's tremendous.
My instinct tells me that the situation is getting worse, and it's not just Trump, it's everything behind it. Although there is courageous resistance from all quarters, including judges and the relatively conservative media (the case of Lawrence O'Donnell, whose excellent, spectacular journalism can be seen on the NBC evening news online, is notable), Trump's coercive, gangster-like power, armed with a mandate of 75 million votes and the almost total submission of the Supreme Court, is devastating. That's why my wife Terry and I are seriously considering, with great regret, leaving the United States, although there doesn't seem to be much room for refuge, given the situation in Europe in general or Spain in particular, with a 20% voting intention for Vox. At my age, I can't see myself living in Australia, and in Canada, a very friendly country close by, it's freezing cold... But the powerful and true truth is that I never would have imagined that in the final stretch of my life I would find myself facing a grotesque reincarnation of the Franco regime I escaped as a young man, and having to fight the same emancipatory battles I fought almost a century ago. The only alternative is the mental gulag of internal exile, deeply rooted in Spain, and waiting for it to subside. But my partner, who lived a very different childhood and youth than I did, finds it incredibly difficult to understand.
