Donald Trump is making the U.S. into his s---hole
Donald Trump denigrating Haiti, El Salvador, and Africa as “s---holes” is like a thief mocking the poverty of someone he has just robbed blind. Trump scorns the refugees who leave these countries for the United States, when it is the destruction wrought in large part by decades of exploitative American policies that forces people to flee.
The countries Trump labels “s---holes” have long been treated by the U.S. like places that “people don’t give one s---” about, to quote Richard Nixon’s description of Latin America; places to be raided for profit, while the resistance of the immiserated masses who pay the price is ruthlessly repressed.
In El Salvador, the U.S. spent $1million a day throughout the 1980s training and arming paramilitary forces, to crush a socialist uprising against the state’s governing plutocracy. Tens of thousands of Salvadorans were murdered, tortured or disappeared by American-sponsored death squads.
In Haiti, a continuous stream of American (as well as French and Canadian) invasions, interventions, and depredations — including the 2004 ousting of the country’s first democratically elected president, priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide — have left the state impecunious and incapacitated.
“Haiti has a vestigial state. There is no national health care, no social security, no pensions, very little taxation, very few labour regulations,” observes American journalist Amy Wilentz, who reported from Haiti for many years.
The massive earthquake that devastated Haiti in 2010 was hailed by U.S. ambassador Kenneth Merten as a “gold rush,” an opportunity for American companies to reap a fortune reconstructing and privatizing the shattered state.
While thousands of Haitians were stuck in camps without permanent housing for years after the disaster, millions of dollars of American aid money were used to develop Caracol Industrial Park: a factory zone built on lands expropriated from hundreds of farmers. Haitian garment workers toil in Caracol for poverty wages — less than $5 a day, a fraction of the cost of living — making cheap clothes to stock American shelves.
“Haiti is the perfect example of what would happen if (the neo-liberal) dream of a privatized state should become a reality,” Wilentz says. That dream, in reality, is a nightmare. A privileged few consume the benefits, while the rest are left with the noxious waste they leave behind: toxified environments, shredded social safety nets, impoverished governments.
Donald Trump’s presidency is unleashing this unbridled rapaciousness inwards. America was always built on acts of internal plunder, on stolen Indigenous land and stolen Black labour.
“Contrasts between private wealth and public squalor abound,” commented the UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty, following a recent visit across the country. Now, Trump’s government of CEOs, bankers and billionaires is making the U.S. into a naked kleptocracy, burning down barriers impeding the pillage of public goods for private gain.
Trump has already torched dozens of environmental regulations — enabling, for example, coal-mining companies to dump toxic wastes in streams, and oil and gas companies to drill on millions of acres of land formerly protected as national monuments.
His recently passed tax reforms effect “a huge redistribution of income from lower- and middle-income families to corporations and business owners,” according to Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman — saving the president and his family millions of dollars, while adding $1.5 trillion to the national deficit and threatening deep cuts to social programs.
Trump has reversed limitations on prison privatization — increasing corporate profits from the mass incarceration of the marginalized — and removed restrictions on police militarization. Domestic dissent is suppressed using private paramilitary contractors originally created to fight the “war on terror” in Iraq and Afghanistan, and counter-insurgency tactics gestated in theatres of intervention, such as El Salvador.
The countries Trump mocks as “s--holes” have often been condescendingly represented as “underdeveloped” or “backwards” — but the truth is that far from being stuck in the past, they have been put on the front lines of our dystopian future. They have not been the waiting rooms of history, but the laboratories: the testing-grounds for methods of repression and dispossession that eventually circulate back home. Refugees are survivors of these experiments in exploitation. “Refugees must be defended . . . because they carry with them a knowledge of our past failures,” writes academic Arun Kundnani. “We must allow them to teach us about ourselves.”
From them, we might learn how to better resist Trump’s savage vision for our world — a world divided ever more sharply between those who are consigned to live in “s---holes,” and those who profit from keeping them there.