In a 26th floor courtroom overlooking Manhattan’s frigid winter skyline, dozens of immigrants sat in on the trial of their former president, the once untouchable symbol of a “narco-dictatorship” that reorganized of the government’s judicial, police, and military leadership to collude with drug traffickers.
It wasn’t Nicolás Maduro — though the Venezuelan president had likewise been indicted in the Southern District of New York. It was Juan Orlando Hernández, the former Honduran president who, as U.S. prosecutors said in their closing arguments in 2024, “paved a cocaine superhighway” to the United States. In a monthlong trial we covered from New York that winter, Hernández was convicted of three counts of drug trafficking and weapons charges, earning him a 45-year prison sentence.
Now, as B-52s plow the skies near Caracas and U.S. President Donald Trump announces the closure of Venezuelan airspace via social media, Hernández is poised to have his conviction erased. A key asset likely working in his favor is something Maduro pointedly lacks: a long-running allyship with the United States. Before his prosecution, Hernández spent years promoting Washington’s goals of militarization and migrant crackdowns as a friend of Barack Obama, Marco Rubio, and Trump.
The hypocrisy is the point.
Weird though it is I sometimes suspect just that.
The sinplest explanation is simply that he’s oblivious to hypocrisy because he’s so narcissistic and so sociopathic that he can’t conceive of any conflicts between his desires since they are all his desires and thus inherently perfect and beautiful, and he conceive of any interpretation of events other than his own.
But there are times, and this is one of them, in which his hypocrisy os so obvious and so brazen that it does feelbaomost deliberately.
And I can actually see it from a warped paychological perspective - basically, he’s demonstrating that niceties like integrity and principles are for the small folk, but as an inherently superior member of the legitimate ruling class, he’s above such things, and entirely free to be just as capricious and self-serving as he pleases. It’s basically an ego flex.
Harmful either way.
Yeah, that’s a key point of fascism (and conservatism in general): rules for thee, not for me.
Right, but it’s also Trump’s personal philosophy.
I don’t think Trump is even capable of considering a coherent ideology - his mind is just too scattershot and too self-absorbed for that.
Rather, I think that what happened is that after his first term. actual fascists like Stephen Miller and Russell Vought and Elon Musk saw Trump as a tool through which they could get what they wanted. They feed his ego-driven tantrums and he demands things because he’s a giant overgrown toddler, and not coincidentally his demands and tantrums align with the fascist agenda that Miller, Vought et al are pursuing.