The Unhinged United States of America

ByMexico Solidarity

This editorial by La Jornada‘s editorial board originally appeared in the August 21, 2025 edition of La Jornada, Mexico’s premier left wing daily newspaper.

During the opening of the 2025 South American Defense Conference (Southdec) in Buenos Aires, the head of the United States Southern Command, Alvin Holsey, warned that “the Chinese Communist Party continues its methodical incursion into the region, seeking to export its authoritarian model, extract resources, and establish dual-use infrastructure, from ports to space.” The admiral alleged that China’s presence and influence have far-reaching consequences in the Southern Cone, “where vital maritime lines of communication, such as the Strait of Magellan and the Drake Passage, function as strategic chokepoints that could be used by the Chinese Communist Party to project power, disrupt trade, and challenge the sovereignty of our nations or the neutrality of Antarctica.”

Florida man Marco Rubio.

Also yesterday, the State Department reiterated its disavowal of Venezuela’s constitutional government and offered up to $25 million for information leading to the arrest or conviction of Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello Rondón for promoting a ” narco-terrorist conspiracy ” between the Los Soles cartel and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Two days earlier, Washington deployed three guided-missile destroyers off the Venezuelan coast to confront “threats from Latin American drug cartels.” The move, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said, was consistent with President Donald Trump’s stance of “using all the resources at his disposal to stop the flow of drugs into our country.”

To round out the barrage of attacks on legality and the reaffirmation of neocolonial assertiveness, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced sanctions against four more judges and prosecutors of the International Criminal Court (ICC), which he described as a “national security threat that has been an instrument of lawfare against the United States and our close ally Israel.” With this round of punitive sanctions, eight ICC officials now face persecution from Washington for daring to investigate the genocide perpetrated by Tel Aviv against the Palestinian people and for seeking to hold Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accountable for his crimes against humanity.

This brief account of actions and statements by members of the Trumpist cabinet—all of which occurred between Monday and yesterday—constitutes a clear demonstration of the hypocrisy, schizophrenia, Orwellian language, violence, and transparently imperial thinking that characterize Trumpism and, to a large extent, the ruling class of the superpower.

Accusations against Beijing alleging it might do everything Washington has done in Latin America for more than a century and a half border on delirium: they accuse it of threats to trade while imposing arbitrary tariffs on the entire planet; they speak of sovereignty while financing coups d’état, installing military bases, establishing blockades condemned by the international community, arrogating to themselves the power to appoint governments, send warships, and offer bounties to overthrow rulers who do not bow to their interests. The very existence of a Southern Command, assigned to control Central and South America and the Caribbean, demonstrates that the only threat to the region’s sovereignty comes from Washington and its local right-wing and far-right allies.

Rubio has called the protesters against the genocide in Gaza “unhinged,” and yesterday Vice President J.D. Vance used the same epithet on the military, dissatisfied with their use to intimidate the civilian population of the District of Columbia. This adjective seems the most appropriate to describe them and all their colleagues in the government that shattered the fragile democratic mask of the United States and that today teeters between authoritarianism and totalitarianism in a way that is dangerous for the inhabitants of the entire planet.

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