COMMENTARY South Florida's Latino leadership embraces Donald Trump — even as he undermines their fight against dictatorships in Latin America by embracing Vladimir Putin's dictatorship in Russia.
This week marks the second anniversary of Russia’s bloody, barbaric invasion of Ukraine.
And what more fitting if mystifying way to observe it in Miami, than to watch our Cuban-American members of Congress endorse the one U.S. presidential candidate who’d cravenly appease Russia’s bloody, barbaric dictatorship — to the benefit of Cuba’s dictatorship, not to mention Venezuela’s and Nicaragua’s?
Republican U.S. Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar is just the latest to give former President Donald Trump a gushing endorsement on social media (including a post on X, the Elon Musk-owned Russian appeasement platform formerly known as Twitter). In it, she checks off all the scourges she claims we didn’t have during Trump’s first administration, including “weak foreign policy.”
Salazar, though, conveniently forgot to put an asterisk there that says: that is, if you define Trump’s weak-in-the-knees treatment of mafioso Russian tyrant Vladimir Putin as strong foreign policy. And our hats off to Trump’s GOP primary opponent Nikki Haley for that spot-on description of Trump’s bootlicking esteem for Putin, which he displayed again this week by not decrying the death — which was perhaps state homicide — of jailed Russian dissident Alexei Navalny.
READ MORE: Trump and DeSantis to MAGAtinos: You can stop worrying about Russia
Yes, I’m aware Salazar condemns Russia’s ongoing seizure of Ukraine. I also applaud Cuban exile groups like The Center for a Free Cuba for signing an open letter that urges Congress to “provide Ukraine the desperately needed security assistance to thwart Russia’s onslaught.”
Cuban and other Trump-supporting Latino cohorts here do seem to get that part. But that just makes it all the more astonishing that MAGAtinos are blind, willfully or not, to the fact that Trump’s doing more than anyone to cripple that desperately needed Ukraine assistance. To the reality that Trump is the cult puppeteer threatening GOP U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson with a pink slip if he lets the Putin-thwarting aid even come up for a vote in his chamber this year.
If Darth Vader can keep his Death Star strong — with a big assist from Trump — he can keep helping all the dark, dilapidated mini-empires stay operable.
It's all too reminiscent of other senseless MAGAtino paradoxes — in Cuban, pro-Trump Hialeah they despise Obamacare because it’s dastardly socialismo, so just ignore the fact that they have the country’s highest Obamacare enrollment — and in this case it’s senselessly self-defeating.
I understand that MAGAtinos believe that Trump is tougher with the left-wing regimes in Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua. That he’ll twist their arms and make them cry uncle. But, after covering Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua for more than three decades, I also appreciate just how maniacally resilient those regimes are — in no small part because they can count on larger, Darth Vader allies like Russia to keep their dark, dilapidated mini-empires operable.
Victory lap
That is, as long as Darth Vader himself can keep his Death Star from stalling out — which is exactly what Trump’s blockage of Ukraine funding does for Putin.
If you needed any reminding of that dastardly dynamic, check out Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s tour through Cuba and Venezuela this week. It was an eye-poking victory lap after the death of Navalny, Russia’s seizure of the Ukrainian city of Avdiivka and Trump’s strangling of aid to Ukraine.
It was Darth Vader’s friendly little drop-by to say: All’s well again on the Death Star, so you can crank up the tropical totalitarianism — you can keep tossin’ those human rights gusanos and escualidos in the slammer, muchachos — ‘cause we’ve got your back.
Salazar — not to mention Miami’s other Cuban-American Trump-toady Congress members, U.S. Representatives Mario Diaz-Balart and Carlos Gimenez, as well as U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio — know that. So do MAGAtino leaders in the Venezuelan exile community.
So why, in the names of José Martí and Simón Bolívar, do they look away from Trump’s toadying to the Russian despot whose despotism he aspires to? Why do they indulge his back-stabbing betrayal of a Ukrainian democracy that he despises because, like those RINO elections officials who wouldn’t steal the 2020 election for him, it didn’t acquiesceto his demands to lie and claim Joe Biden had corrupt ties to Ukrainian business?
Why, bottom line, do MAGAtinos keep quiet as Trump does nothing less than undermine the one cause they claim to champion more than any other: the downfall of authoritarian socialismo — the liberation of their patrias?
And when you’ve explained that to me, tell me why they keep enrolling in Obamacare.
