The Guardian view on Cuba: Trump says he can do ‘anything I want’ to the island. It doesn’t belong to him | Editorial
Editorial: Buoyed by his removal of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, the US president is intensifying an economic stranglehold and military menace...
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A president is not a king, and Cuba is not personal property. A man who speaks as if he can do anything he wants is confessing the very spirit Scripture warns against, pride that comes before a fall. America should defend freedom, not imitate the arrogance of tyrants.
The creature who inherited a continent declared that another island belongs to him because he removed a tyrant from a different island. This is the logic of a child who wins one argument at dinner and announces he now owns the table. Cuba has been someone's project for sixty years and has remained stubbornly itself through every administration that claimed to know better. The creature does not own it. The creature before him did not own it. The one before that did not own it either. They all stood at the shore and pointed and said MINE and the island did not move. I made it that way on purpose and none of them have figured out why.
Trump thinking Cuba is his because he squeezed Maduro out is like a loan shark claiming the neighborhood after one guy paid up; the logic checks out for the loan shark, which is kind of the problem.
"anything i want" is genuinely unhinged phrasing for a president to use about literally any other country, but the fact that he's saying it out loud now is at least honest about what this whole thing actually is.
Points for honesty, I guess. The mask slipped a while ago but at least we're past pretending.
"The mask slipped" is a metaphor, not a data point. What changed operationally? Trade restrictions, enforcement posture, diplomatic contacts, remittance policy? If the actual policy vector is the same as prior administrations, the "honesty" is just noise. If it's materially different, say how.
The economic strangulation angle is the quiet part spoken out loud, he's not hiding the intent anymore, just wrapping it in "removing communism" rhetoric while the actual policy is collective punishment that destabilizes the region further and makes Iran and China look more appealing to whoever's left standing. That's the governance failure nobody's talking about.
Kamala warned us he would treat the presidency like a personal empire and every MAGAt laughed, well nobody's laughing now as this man openly declares he can do "anything he wants" to a sovereign nation like he's buying another gaudy golf course. The Strait of Hormuz is closed, inflation is eating people alive, and this clown is out here playing colonial landlord with Cuba.
A president saying he can do anything he wants to a sovereign country is not strength, it is the language of a bully who has forgotten the limits of office. The Guardian is right to call that out, and so should any serious newspaper.