Trump and I can agree: The US is a third-world country | inequality

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When on August 8 the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) raided Donald Trumps Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida in search of classified documents, the ex-president of the United States decried the episode as an assault [that] could only take place in broken, third-world countries. He continued to lament that America had now become one of those countries, corrupt at a level not seen before.

Trumps son, Donald Trump Jr, chimed inon Twitter with the assessment: This is what you see happen in 3rdWorld Banana Republics!!!Never mind that the FBIs seizure of secret documents does not fit the corruption bill quite as well as some other characteristics of American democracy: say, the fact that non-taxpaying billionaires can be president or that the country is run as a crooked, oligarchic corporatocracy.

This is not the first time Trump has liked the US to a third-world country, which was also his epithet of choice when he lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden. But Trump & Co are not the only members of the US ruling elite to exercise this vocabulary. The January 2021 attack on the US Capitol prompted a surge in pejorative third world and banana republic comparisons from everyone from Biden to George W Bush, former US leader and civilized ravager of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Indeed, it is impossible to understate the bipartisan imperial hubris that is on display in the casual deployment of such lingo. By implicitly and unironically mocking underdeveloped nations, the US political establishment appears to have conveniently forgotten the countrys own historical role in creating the banana republic phenomenon in the first place and in ensuring that the third world remains, you know, third.

The term banana republic was coined in 1904 by American writer O Henry in reference to the Central American nation of Honduras, which, like neighboring Guatemala, was an early victim of predatory US capitalism and corporate exploitation. The economic and physical wellbeing of the inhabitants of such lowly nations was naturally of no concern to the hemispheric behemoth, which ensured its unfettered access to regional resources by backing right-wing coups, bloody civil wars, corrupt dictatorships and death squads in other words, stuff that was slightly more devastating than an FBI search of Mar-a-Lago.

The Cold War, of course, provided a handy alibi for US-backed killing worldwide, from NicaraguatoAngola while also spawning the third-world designation that would go on to increased patronizing connotations. Once the communist menace had been replaced with the terrorist menace as the primary US excuse for lethal international interference, the remaining global superpower continued to extend a charitable hand to the impoverished third world often via a form of corporate neocolonialism cast as development.

And while Trumps recent tantrum about the US as a broken, third-world country can certainly be filed under the expansive category of Distastefully Kooky Things Trump Has Said, there is also an unintended element of truth to it. Like it or not, the US fits the third-world stereotype in many respects and not just in terms of its oligarchic style of governance.

The US advertises itself as being at the vanguard of global development, but the nations healthcare, poverty and other indicators suggest a policy of willful counterdevelopment instead. Back in 2017, Philip Alston, the United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, visited the US for two weeks. At the end of his trip, he issued a statement on how he found the countryexceptional in waysthat are shockingly at odds with its immense wealth and its founding commitment to human rights.

Despite managing to spend more money on national defense than China, Russia, the United Kingdom and a bunch of other big spenders combined, the US had some 40 million people living in poverty amid glaring contrasts between private wealth and public squalor.

As Alston noted, the US was also alone among developed countries in insisting that human rights did not include rights that guard against dying of hunger, dying from a lack of access to affordable healthcare, or growing up in a context of total deprivation. So much for thatline from the US Declaration of Independence about inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Its hard to pursue anything if youre dead.

Speaking of death, infant mortality ratesin the USare higher thanin Cuba, an island that has spent more than 60 years under anasphyxiating US embargo. Trump himself imposed no fewer than243 new sanctions against the Cubans as punishment for their crime of pursuing national sovereignty over the banana republic model and, for good measure, threw Cuba back on the US list of state sponsors of terrorism.

Back in the land of the free, meanwhile, homelessness has reachedghastly levels unseen even in many underdeveloped countries, and the US has long maintained thehighestincarceration rate in the world although itmay have recently been surpassedby El Salvador, another place where US support for human rights hasinvolved backing right-wingstate terror.

Such is the ironic nature of imperial power, it seems, that the global hegemon responsible for oppressing much of the third world must also keep a significant portion of its own populace in third-world conditions.

As per Trumps twisted logic, any attempt to hold him accountable for anything is evidence that the US is a corrupt and broken, third-world country. And while theres no sense in wasting time on Trumpian delusion, we might nevertheless take the opportunity to recall that old saying about the broken clock and to acknowledge that the US is definitively broken.

The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial stance.

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