Forged for public life on a trashy TV show (the movie is recommended) The apprentice(which takes its title from the television show Trump hosted for years and which explains how he began to build his persona), Donald Trump understands that politics consists above all of this: his public presence, repeated every day on every channel, on every network, at all hours, without pause or rest. This strategy is the same one that secured him his first term as president, but in this second term, he and his team have fine-tuned it to the maximum, when in this case tune It means taking a crude and aggressive approach to the extreme. The media throughout the West, of course, play a decisive role, unable to avoid (he is, after all, the US president) reacting in a Pavlovian manner to the frenzied, almost visceral, stimuli emanating from the White House daily.
Thus, world public opinion began the year outraged by the violation of Venezuela's sovereignty and by the kidnapping of Maduro by Yankee special forces: that Maduro was a low-level (but truly fearsome) dictator is not a justification for a change of state that, moreover, should not be in front of the country, the repression too, and the only thing that has changed is the plundering of Venezuelan oil by the Trump administration.
The first month of the year is ending, and it's been days since anyone has thought about it, Maduro. Meanwhile, Trump has threatened to annex Greenland by any means necessary, strained transatlantic relations almost to the point of collapse, and called into question (and ridiculed, thanks also to a Secretary General like Mark Rutte, manifestly subservient to him) the very existence and raison d'être of NATO. Threatening Iran, he co-starred with the grotesque María Corina Machado (a major figure of the Spanish right, by the way) in a farce over the Nobel Peace Prize, causing horror, disgust, and concern throughout the world over the actions of ICE, with the executions in the middle of the street of Renee Go in Minneapolis, which, obviously, threaten to spread throughout the US and be imitated by other countries with far-right governments. We have also witnessed the fleeting rise and fall of the head of ICE, Greg Bovino, another grotesque figure, a trademark of the same tactic.
Each of the events listed in the previous paragraph constitutes a scandal capable of defining an entire presidency (just as Nixon's was associated with Watergate, Clinton's with the Lewinsky affair, and Bush Jr.'s with the invasion of Iraq): Trump has the indecent ability to condense them all into a single month. The protests and repercussions of the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti at the hands of ICE agents have led him to momentarily lower his tone, but it is obvious that the storm, and the drums of war, will begin to beat again at any moment.
