​From Terrible Trujillo to Tempestuous Trump

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

Will the Divided States of America end up selling bananas?

Sixty-nine years ago, I was in charge of an advance party of the 6th Marines Regiment assigned for training in the Caribbean at Vieques Island, Puerto Rico and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, with stops in the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Our job was to set up housing, latrines, tents, water supplies and recreation areas for about a four-month training schedule. In addition, it was also our job to spend a lot of time on the islands.

First, a little history. In the beginning of the 20th century, some Caribbean countries were involved in what was called the “Banana Wars” involving the huge United Fruit Company. To protect the commercial interests of the U.S. company, the U.S. government sent U.S. Marines to several countries to protect plantations, putting down strikes by native laborers, suppressing revolutions by “rebels,” protecting railroads, keeping roads open and, in general, maintaining political stability favoring our business interests.

Marine General Smedley Butler, decorated for combat in the Caribbean, later summed up his reactions to the Banana Wars in a famous quote oft repeated: “War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious, it is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. I spent most of my time as a high-class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street, in short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.”

So, to a Marine officer, he really believed that war is a scheme to enrich a small group of industrialists and bankers while the common people bear the costs in terms of lives and physical and mental suffering.

In my active-duty period of 1954-57, I was stationed at Camp Lejeune North Carolina, the base of the Second Marine Division commanded by Lt. General Lewis “Chesty” Puller, the most-decorated Marine in history with five Navy Crosses, the highest Navy award. Chesty had enlisted as a private in 1918, fought in Haiti and other Caribbean countries, and was awarded the Navy Cross for valor in those battles. He later fought in World War II, the Korean War, and later volunteered to go to Vietnam but was denied. He was too old. He may be the only Marine to start his career as a private and end up a Lt. General. He was often meritoriously promoted in combat. Puller is still revered as a “Marine’s Marine” for his courage, loyalty, and refusal to ask anything of his men that he wouldn’t do himself. I still remember his comment at a meeting about being an officer: “If we are in the field and I catch you eating before your men, I will ship you to Butte, Montana!”

In my time in the Caribbean, I had the opportunity to visit Cuba before the Castro revolution and enjoyed a Havana night club run by mob boss Lucky Luciano, experienced San Juan, Puerto Rico, and the hell hole of the Dominican Republic run by Dictator Rafael Trujillo. He graduated from elementary school, was a telegraph operator for a short time, and then became a prison guard with the assistance of US Marines. He then enlisted in the National Guard and later became commander of the National Army.

Marines had occupied and ruled the country between 1916 and 1924. Trujillo, leader of the Dominican Republic, took over in 1930 in a coup, then rigged presidential elections and dominated it until he was assassinated in 1961. He intimidated or used force to eliminate rivals. He violated human rights, torturing and murdering thousands of dissenters and “disappeared” hundreds. He hated his neighbors, the Haitians, and over the years was estimated to have killed between 12,000-30,000 in attempts to change the border. He developed a cult of personality by renaming the capital city Santo Domingo to Ciudad Trujillo. He ordered every public building, private home and business to hang pictures of him in prominent places. He ordered statues of him in city and town squares. Thousands of streets and monuments were renamed “Trujillo.” The slogan “God and Trujillo” was on roadside signs. Trujillo and his friends in high places monopolized many industries and gained immense wealth.

The United States supported him because he was “anti-communist.” I was there during Mardi Gras. Guess who was selected queen? Right — one of his daughters. He was finally assassinated by officers in his own party in another coup attempt. Trujillo had many weapons, but his major weapon was fear. One day in civvies, I walked into a diner and, playing the innocent, I asked the waiter with my high school Spanish: “Who is that guy in the picture?” He almost fainted on the spot. Perhaps he thought I was going to take him to prison for treatment.

Trump and Project 2025 is back to the past, not to future

Well John Roberts, now that your Supreme Court has opened the cash floodgates to billionaires who can rent, lease and buy politicians from ward bosses and township chairmen to presidents, have you come up with a plan to control the king you created out of the Manhattan village idiot who is the “most dangerous man in the world” and “who is not well?” King Donald, the only man in the Divided States of America who is now above the law, is fanatically busy turning the country into a rotten Banana. His only human talent will result in holding the Guiness World Book record for lying in a lifetime.

I covered a little history of the Dominican Republic under Trujillo because King Donald is mimicking him in many ways. The Lyin’ King wants “Trump” on hotels and golf courses around the world, on his $350 million ballroom in the White House (which was built by Black slaves) and on streets and avenues in every city of the country. He has already exceeded Trujillo in number-of-kills games. Another malignant narcissist named Elon Musk, a buddy of Trump until un-buddied, has caused 600,000 deaths (which will increase exponentially for many years) through his cuts of USAID programs around the world by utilizing the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). A study by population experts figured those funding cuts would kill another 1.3 million.

It’s my time to reveal positions in society Trump is exactly qualified for besides the Guiness Book of World Records for constantly lying. He is fully qualified to be a sexual predator because he is facing 27 sexual assault cases and owes E. Jean Carroll about $88 million and he fulfills all of the characteristics of the following mentally ill members of society: jerk, prick, asshole, malignant narcissist socio-psychopath (look them up in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition) and a coward with five deferments for bone spurs in the heels.

There is no doubt Trump wants to be a dictator like Hitler or Putin. Historian Hannah Arendt has written that authoritarians and dictators have serious problems choosing loyal followers.

“Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty,” she says. (Think Hegseth, Patel, Ludnick, Kennedy, Noem.)

Podcaster Will Stancill uses just one sentence: “The key fact about Donald Trump is that, in addition to being infinitely self-absorbed and having no morals whatsoever, he is an almost impossibly stupid man.”

Maureen Dowd of The New York Times, one of my favorites with a bite, wrote about his decorating taste: “A Jackie Kennedy garden was plowed under by the bulldozers. The woman with the best taste in the history of the White House was rubbished by the man with the worst taste in the history of the White House.” No wonder the American Civil Liberties Union has sued this Trump administration 430 times — with three years to go!

Bill McKibben, an expert in climate, is also a Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College who has other interests. His views about what has happened to evangelical Christians are important because of their acceptance of rightwing politics.

“We have watched over the years as rightwing evangelical churches have turned the Jesus we grew up with into exactly the opposite of who we understood him to be,” he said. “At its most basic, they turned a figure of love into a figure of hate who blesses precisely the cruelties that he condemned in the Gospel; we went from ‘from the meek shall inherit the Earth’ to ‘the meek shall die of cholera.’ This has happened more slowly over decades instead of months, but nonetheless it is unsettling in the same ways, a disorienting gut punch for many of us.”

Will the Vatican finally dump Trump? Trujillo helped build churches

After Trujillo scored his coup, the Vatican reps in the Dominican Republic grudgingly agreed to support him because he was anti-communist like the church. But as the human rights violations became more violent and disturbing, Catholics became verbal opponents. Trujillo silenced many of the religious critics by building schools and churches to expand the Catholic Church while keeping Protestant churches out of the Caribbean.

The American and Peruvian Pope Leo XIV may lead his cardinals and bishops to defeat the deportation policies of the Lyin’ King. Leo’s bishops came out with a very strong protest about the sadistic treatment of the supposed 22 million in the country:”We oppose the mass and indiscriminate deportation of people. We pray for an end to dehumanizing rhetoric and violence, both against immigrants and law enforcement. We pray that the Lord guides the leaders of our nation, and we are grateful for past and present opportunities to engage in dialogue with public officials and elected representatives.”

Pope Leo has assumed command of that position by demanding that ICE rethink its demonization of more than two million migrant “illegal aliens” who have been involuntarily removed from the country in the last year. He also criticized the killing of suspected Venezuelan boat occupants who were suspected of running potent drugs to the Divided States of America, warning the administration such illegal actions would fail in the long run.

The new President of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Archbishop Paul Coakley of Oklahoma City is considered to be a supporter of right-wing politics. He added this statement to Catholic immigration policies sent to the Trump administration: “Remember: Jesus was once a refugee.”

The vice-president, Bishop Daniel Flores of Brownsville, Texas (the center of a lot of immigration action) added he was concerned about the violent and often brutal treatment of the undocumented. I hope Pope Leo can finish what Pope Francis started.