COMMENTARY President Trump says Latin America needs America "much more than we need them." Not anymore: his Jan. 6 pardons destroyed the rule-of-law example Latin America did need from us.
After President Trump’s second inauguration on Monday, as he was penning more signatures than most folks scribble when they buy a house, a Brazilian journalist asked him about Latin America.
“They need us much more than we need them,” Trump said with a dismissive shrug.
“We don’t need them. They need us.”
It was the sort of sneering, juvenile putdown Trump loves to aim at Latin America, like those paper towels he tossed at Puerto Ricans after Hurricane Maria destroyed their island in 2017. In his inaugural address, when he doubled down on his preposterous pledge to seize the Panama Canal, he made it clear Panama might as well be one of the “shithole” countries he denigrated in his first presidency.
Just another loser that needs Trump much more than Trump needs it.
READ MORE: Biden's pardon sets a foul example for America — and the Americas
But let’s say, to humor him, that before this week Trump was right — that Latin America and the Caribbean needed us much more than we needed them. Even if he were right then, he’s not anymore — thanks to no one except Trump.
That’s because this week Trump destroyed something Latin America did need from America:
Our example.
With one of those signatures, Trump pardoned or commuted sentences for the almost 1,600 MAGA insurrectionists charged or convicted in the violent Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Congress, a seditious attempt to overturn the 2020 election that Trump lost at the end of his first presidency.
With one swipe of his Sharpie, Trump revoked America’s constitutional rule of law.
Trump has now definitively defiled the key thing that distinguished America from Latin America — our expectation of constitutional lawfulness.
As he did in 2021 when he incited the Capitol rioters — many of whom viciously assaulted police officers and menaced then Vice President Mike Pence with a noose — Trump has again defiled instead of defended the key thing that distinguishes America from Latin America.
From the Venezuelas, Cubas, Nicaraguas, Guatemalas, Haitis and Hondurases, where constitutional rule of law is usually more farce than fact.
Sure, you can argue Latin America needs our trade and technology and finance, or that it couldn’t get by without the cash remittances its migrants send back from our fields and hotels and construction sites. Maybe — but then again, it’s proven in this century that China can be a pretty darn adequate substitute for America in those departments.
Conquistadorism vs. constitutionalism
No, the commodity Latin America needs most from America — the yanqui model that’s helped the region metamorphose from dictatorial conquistadorism to democratic constitutionalism — is our lawfulness.

God knows the U.S. hasn’t always lived up to that model in this hemisphere, especially when we’ve propped up lawless tyrants like Pinochet, Somoza and Duvalier. But rarely have we ever trashed it on our own soil as definitively as Trump and the MAGA mob did on Jan. 6.
Or as Trump’s new Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that day, referring to all the Latin Americans he grew up with in Miami: “Today America looked like the countries that they came here to get away from.”
Which is precisely why it was so important — so historically vital — that the people who planned and perpetrated the Jan. 6 uprising were brought to justice. That includes Trump himself, who was about to be prosecuted until he won the presidency again in November.
With the Jan. 6 convictions, America at least showed Latin America that Latin American-style impunity did not in the end triumph over American-style rule of law. They were a reminder that in spite of Jan. 6, America was still a touchstone.
Not now.
Trump’s pardons of even the worst Jan. 6 offenders, the fulfillment of his pathetic if not sinister effort to erase the event from history, has also erased for the time being the American example.
In its place, he’s exalted the image of American convicts like Miami’s Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the white supremacist hate group Proud Boys, who until this week’s pardon was serving a 22-year prison sentence for seditious conspiracy in the Jan. 6 plot.
The Proud Boys wear a patch reading “RWDS” — a reference to the right-wing death squads that have long symbolized a historic contempt for constitutional rule of law in so much of Latin America.
So no, President Trump, it turns out Latin America actually doesn’t need America anymore.
Thanks to you.