American Caudillo

Venezuelans recognize strongman politics when we see them.

I see the story about Trump directing the government to use Federal money to buy nakedly political ads, lightly disguised as Public Service Announcements. You see those stories too, of course. Like me you’re outraged and shocked at the corruption. Like me you fret over who, if anyone, is going to put a stop to it. But when I see it, there’s something else: déjà vu.

My mind casts back to Venezuela 25 years ago—when our democracy was beginning to totter—and looks for parallels. I remember the cadenas—when Hugo Chávez started commandeering air time on private broadcasters for nakedly political harangues. The Venezuelan governments had always reserved the right to issue all-channel broadcasts, mostly invoked in case of natural disasters. Just like the U.S. government has always run PSAs, for legitimate purposes. The move, in both cases, is the same: manhandle some power that has always been in the books and turn it nakedly political, disfiguring it in the process.

Look, I realize that Hugo Chávez, the socialist revolutionary, has exactly nothing in common ideologically with Donald Trump, the hard right reactionary. But then, why is watching American news such a minefield for the Venezuelan exile memory?

Because, I think, what Chávez and Trump share matters much more. They share a visceral sense of power—what it is, and what it means to wield it.

For Trump, like for Chávez, the only kind of power worth having is untrammeled power. Power with an asterisk holds no appeal to him. Power within-agreed-bounds, power that must account for itself, power that is divided or circumscribed or in any way hemmed in by what anybody else thinks, is no power at all. The layers and layers of constraints that constitutionalists and scholars and lawyers always want to wrap power in are, to them, the negation of power.

In Spanish, we have a word for the man who wields power in this way: caudillo. Limply glossed as “strongman,” a caudillo is so much more: a messianic figure locked in a strange, quasi-mystical transaction with his followers. In a famous column, Carlos Alberto Montaner described it as an “abdication” of people’s sovereignty: “the people, exhausted by the failure of the system … find an illuminated man and deposit in him all the power needed to fix the problems that stubbornly refused to be fixed by other means.”

Trump Wants to Dominate Venezuela, Not Liberate It

What people like Trump, and Chávez before him, grasp is the atavistic thirst that people have for a caudillo. That some people want to be led this way, that they simply don’t buy the story that limited power can solve their problems. Those people are not simply there to be exploited. The caudillo shares their view of the problem and makes his pitch: only I can fix it. The caudillo and his followers share a transcendent goal: to establish untrammeled power, first, in order to put all downstream objectives within reach.

Which is why Trump, like Chávez before him, seems to spend so much time on symbolic fights about who is allowed to say “no” to him. Otherwise inexplicable controversies fall into focus when you see them in this light. The decision to bulldoze the White House East Wing, and threaten to do the same to the Kennedy Center, seem like strange side-quests in a normal political frame. But the caudillo’s frame is not normal, and he finds establishing that no-one is allowed to stand in his way infinitely more important than the minutiae of governing. The bizarre fight over the naming of the Kennedy Center is not, then, a sideshow: it’s the center of Trump’s program, a determined push to establish power fully unconstrained by law, or precedent, or common sense.

These types of symbolic fights were constant in the early years of chavismo, and they served the same goal. At one point, Chávez decided he was going to change the Venezuelan Coat of Arms because his elementary-school-aged child told him to, and he did it: the stupid little horse now runs towards the glorious revolutionary left, rather than towards the right, like it used to. Which might sound like an insane little Venezuelan culture war detail, except it wasn’t a detail: the caudillo must exercise power idiosyncratically just to make it plain to everyone that it is his personal will that’s being enacted, and not anyone else’s.

Seeing the stable democracy you grew up in sputter and fall apart does things to a person. I don’t follow Venezuelan politics closely anymore, but Venezuelan politics follow me. The loss stalks me every time I open the news.

And look, I know. Believe me, I understand that projecting my own lived trauma onto the very different reality of 21st century America is foolish and intellectually indefensible. I seldom voice the parallels as I notice them, because I don’t want to come across as arrogant, or dismissive, or Cassandraish. Nine times out of ten, I don’t say anything.

But still, I notice. I can’t help but notice the correspondences, one after another. My mind does this thing automatically where it matches Trump’s latest outrage with the parallel moment in Venezuela’s slide, in the background, as it were.

Take the FCC’s ongoing feud with Jimmy Kimmel. The U.S. telecoms regulator has made no effort to disguise its campaign of intimidation against Kimmel, who if this was happening in any other country we’d describe as “an opposition-aligned comedian.” First, ABC announced it would suspend Kimmel’s show, then it had to back down following a public outcry. Then, the FCC began to hassle ABC’s Texas affiliates, warning them that if they showed Kimmel’s interview with Democratic Candidate for Senate James Talarico, they’d have to do the same for Ken Paxton, the Republican candidate.

There are, for sure, rules about broadcaster neutrality in the months before an election that do, in fact, give the FCC a plausible-ish case. Except, of course, there is no conceivable world where a Trump-aligned broadcaster decides to interview only a Republican Senate candidate and the FCC steps in to demand fairness for the Democratic candidate. The nakedly political intent of the FCC’s intervention is the point of the FCC’s intervention.

We’re all adults here, nobody is deceived.

The déjà vu in this case was the bitter memory of the way Hugo Chávez first hassled opposition media, sending in tax inspectors, then began shutting down opposition broadcasters and buying up opposition newspapers, until what had been a free, rambunctious public sphere went entirely silent, and stopped holding power to account in any way. I cannot see Brendan Carr push Disney/ABC around without the whole movie of the collapse of Venezuelan free speech playing out in my head.

And look, I know the collapse of free speech feels far away in America right now: you can find a harsh attack on Trump on the air and in the press—to say nothing of the internet—at every hour of every day. But then, I remember how impossible it had seemed to me that Chávez could ever successfully silence Venezuela’s wild, rambunctious media when he started trying—and in a few years, he’d done it.

Once you’ve seen a few impossible things happen, you stop believing in impossibles.

The routinization of law-breaking, the increasingly unembarrassed graft, the personalization of, well, everything—all of it serves the caudillo’s purpose. Lawlessness has to be bold, in your face, ostentatious to have the desired impact: to shock friend and foe alike into realizing that the rules of the game have changed for good. That a caudillo is not like a normal human being, and will not be held to normal human standards. That none of yesterday’s certainties hold, because the people in power do not recognize the legitimacy of any measure aimed at curbing the caudillo’s power.

Hugo Chávez and Donald Trump are different in every single way, except the one that matters. They are profoundly, personally affronted by any attempt to limit their power. Their deepest ideological commitment is their determinismo to be the caudillo. It’s not a matter of convenience. For once, it’s a principled commitment. This they believe in.

Quico Toro is a contributing editor at Persuasion, the founder of Caracas Chronicles, Director of Climate Repair at the Anthropocene Institute, and writes the Substack One Percent Brighter. He lives in Tokyo.

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