01/20/2025
TRUMP AND DOUBLE SPEECHBy Brasil Acosta PeñaAccording to the Royal Spanish Academy of Language, the word bifida means “that is divided into two parts” and, therefore, a forked tongue is one that is divided into two parts; snakes or vipers have this condition and it seems that the president-elect of the United States (US) has this condition, since he has double talk and we must learn to discover it. History must be taken into account and is essential. We must remember that, in his first electoral campaign, Donald Trump promised to build a wall and assured that Mexicans would pay for it. The wall was not built because it required 33 billion dollars and the US Congress only allocated 1.6 billion dollars to projects on the border, less than five percent of what was required; One thing was the speech and another the reality. We must also remember that Trump told the López Obrador government at the time that it should put “28 thousand soldiers on the border, for free” (El CEO, YouTube, April 2022) and threatened to put 25 percent tariffs on the products that Mexico exports (remember that 79.6 percent of the goods that Mexico exports are sent to the United States). That is Trump’s double talk and we must get used to discovering it. Let’s see. In game theory, which is widely used in negotiation processes when private interests confront each other in the market or in geopolitical negotiations, there is a tactic known as “threats,” which serves in negotiations as a mechanism to soften the opponent. However, in that same theory, threats are classified as credible and non-credible. Therefore, as a negotiator and media specialist, rather than as a politician, we must learn to distinguish what is true and what is false in what Trump tells us; What is a non-credible threat and what is serious. For example, he threatened to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico, so what? He threatened to raise 25 percent tariffs on products from Mexico if we did not restrict imports or investments from China or if we did not combat drug cartels and fentanyl trafficking from Mexico to the United States. Trump also threatened Panamanians with regaining control of the Panama Canal; however, deep down he does not want to get it back, his threats are intended to soften up the government of that country so that it reduces the tariffs charged to American ships that pass through there (There you go!, Mirko Casale, December 26, 2024), therefore, we must understand Trump's double talk and discover what he really wants. Seen in this light, the US is in serious economic trouble and needs money to be able to face it: it has the largest debt in the world; The de-dollarization of trade in BRICS countries; the failure of the war in Ukraine, which has always had the purpose of distracting the Russians and keeping the members of the European Union under control; the recent forest fires; the devastating condition of millions of drug-addicted Americans; the decomposition of youth, which causes massacres in high schools, etc., are just some of the signs of the decadence of the capitalist system. Trump's threatening language is a sign of his weakness. Faced with the impossibility of competing fairly in the commercial field with Mexican or Chinese products, with low prices and high quality, he uses as a pretext the failed fight against drug trafficking, the impunity of the cartels and the increase in the migration phenomenon; or, in the case of China, the unproven accusation of exporting "precursors of fentanyl" to impose 25 percent tariffs and artificially raise the price of the products by a quarter. That is Trump's double talk; and the only alternative to stop imperialism will always be the unity of the peoples; we must get closer to Russia, China and Latin America to build a multipolar world that is fairer and better for all humanity.