A man convicted on 34 felony charges of falsifying business records, and found liable in a civil court for sexual abuse and defamation, now says that as US president he is unbound by international law and answers only to “my own morality”.
Donald Trump’s latest boast came at the end of a week when his forces abducted the Venezuelan president abroad and after his ICE agents killed a mother of three on home soil.
In Venezuela, he violated the nation’s sovereignty. In Minneapolis, he pre-empted any investigation into the shooting of Renee Good, claimed she had tried to run over an ICE agent and that the armed agent who killed her by firing three shots point blank acted in self-defence.
There is no aspect, now, of international law that Trump believes he is bound by. And few of domestic, either.
In an interview with The New York Times, he was asked whether there were any limits on his use of American military might.
“Yeah, there is one thing,” he replied. “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me. I don’t need international law. I’m not looking to hurt people.”
In Bogata, Colombia’s capital, that claim is dismissed outright.
Filipe Grisaldo, a bookshop assistant not far from Palaza de Bolivar, the central square in the capital, represents many when he says that for the last week he has felt genuinely afraid that his country would come under American attack.
“Here where I work is very close to the government buildings. If the Americans come, I could be killed,” he adds.
His fear was caused by Trump’s threats against Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, who, the US president said, needs to “watch his ass”.
“He has cocaine mills and cocaine factories and isn’t going to be doing it very long,” Trump threatened earlier this week.
When asked if he favoured military intervention against Colombia’s drug operations, the president said, “sounds good”.
This week, thousands of people flooded onto Plaza de Bolivar, named after South America’s “liberator”, Simon Bolivar, to protest at the US threats – made before Trump insisted he was above international law.
Colombia’s military is already on high alert along its border with Venezuela, dealing with transnational narco-gangs like Tren de Aragua, and with rebel movements like ELN and FARC, also involved in international drugs and gold smuggling.
Cocaine production in Colombia is at its highest ever. But the US and Bogota have worked together for years trying to reduce the scale of the problem for both countries.
“It is the longer history between South and Central America and the US that really frightens me, though,” says Grisaldo.
“We had decades when the US was operating in our countries, supporting authoritarians and guerrilla groups that brought chaos.”
In the 1960s and for the next three decades, until the fall of the Soviet Union, successive governments in Washington backed covert and overt operations to keep socialist and communist-leaning leaders from power in America’s backyard.
Cuba remains isolated and under a crippling economic embargo as a socialist state established by Fidel Castro.
The US was instrumental in the 1973 coup against Salvador Allende, who was killed, and backed the reign of terror of right-wing dictator Augusto Pinochet until 1990.
US military support for successive military regimes in Guatemala led to UN allegations of acts of genocide against the Indigenous people. The US backed Contra guerrillas in Nicaragua, and supported death squad regimes in El Salvador, plus the “dirty war” of Argentina’s dictatorship. The list is longer than this.
Those US actions sought to offset a threat of growing Soviet influence and the possibility of establishing military bases to threaten the US.
Today, there is no obvious physical danger from Vladimir Putin’s Russia. His efforts to restore the Soviet empire have focused on Eastern Europe. He has weaponised the cyber realms and social media to undermine democracy across the West, including the US, to this end. He wants Ukraine – not Uruguay.
Trump is leaving Putin to pursue his aim to regain dominance over Eastern Europe while his focus is on the western hemisphere.
To that end, he has withdrawn further from international bodies and treaties, leaving 31 UN bodies and agreements and more than 30 others that cover global efforts to mitigate climate change and defend the rights of women.
“American dominance in the western hemisphere will never be questioned again,” Trump said after the Venezuelan operation.
His focus lies on the drug cartels, which have evolved into military organisations with nation-sized budgets in the bloody soup of South and Central America’s proxy wars between Moscow and Washington.
Chaos and compromise led to vast ungoverned spaces and weak governments unable, or unwilling, to deal with the explosion of criminal gangs.
These gangs, Trump insists, now pose a threat to US security. But now Trump, in turn, poses a threat to the security of allies in the US’s “war on drugs”.
He has backed away from threatening Colombia’s president for now and has instead invited him to a meeting at the White House.
Petro has readily agreed because when Trump makes threats, as Maduro has found out and Greenland may soon, he tends to mean it. And his business and personal life shows that he is unhindered by complex ethics.
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