The Trump Presidency Viewed from Afar- An Expat´s Perspective from Mexico City
I would like to say I will never forget where I was when I saw now-President Donald Trump´s infamous descent from the escalators of Trump Tower in June of 2015, but the truth is I did not pay it all that much mind. The initial campaign salvo just seemed like a half-baked publicity stunt, and while his offensive, blatantly racist comments about Mexicans were jarring, by that point I was not at all surprised to hear an opinion in this vein from any American, let alone an un-PC, unapologetic bigot like the former reality TV host and real estate tycoon. In this time, I was preparing for my move to Mexico City in August of that year, with the objective of starting a career as an English as a Foreign Language instructor. I was all set to begin an exciting post-college adventure after a rather tedious year spent in my sleepy hometown working odd jobs after graduating, but many whom I told that I was moving to México lambasted me with falsehoods: ¨¨Bring a bulletproof vest!¨¨The amount of white men who have died in Mexico City can wrap around the world twice¨ and other assertions so absurd they would have seemed laughable, if they had not actually represented the point of view of a surprisingly high number of Americans.
As I underwent my physical exam, which was mandatory to work abroad, an aging doctor rattled off dubious statistics about the number of Mexicans who had ¨ïnvaded¨ the grand old U.S.A., before bluntly encouraging me to tell my students in Mexico ¨to stay home.¨ Trump simply confirmed what many xenophobic Americans had always thought, but I figured that his lack of experience, professionalism, and class would doom him against more polished (if at times equally ideologically noxious) former Governors like Scott Walker or Jeb Bush. As I watched clips of the first Republican debate in August 2015 in my uncle´s living room in Los Angeles, images of what Mexico City would be like dancing in my head, Trump seemed like a sideshow.
Conversely, for the next nearly 5 years, the soon-to-be President Trump has loomed like a shadow over my life-changing experience in Mexico. It has been quite easy in my position to view the whole surreal Trump Presidency as a bad dream or an engrossing but ridiculous TV show, especially from the lens of a country which overwhelmingly hates and dismisses the U.S. President, and seemingly the whole concept of national leaders in general. This is the story of how the mind-boggling specter of a Trump presidency has forever colored my stay in México.
The Campaign Viewed from Mexico
As I began to teach Mexican students and actually got to know their dreams and aspirations, I realized the extreme fear of my doctor and other like-minded US citizens that all Mexicans wanted to hop over the border and establish residence in our country was way off the mark. When asked which countries they would love to live in if given the opportunity, many students stated Canada, England, Germany, or Australia, with nary a single student desiring to move to the nearby United States. When asked why nobody had chosen the U.S., many said that while it was an interesting country to visit, they simply were not intrigued by the idea of living there.
Not surprisingly, the subject of Trump came up relatively frequently, especially as 2015 gave way to 2016 and his chances of actually obtaining the Republican nomination seemed more and more possible. I integrated the news-worthy topic of his unlikely rise frequently, adapting New York Times or Washington Post articles about the election for higher-level students, while entertainingly having students act as Donald Trump or his supporters in raucous role plays. Inevitably, a student would ask me if I thought Trump actually had a chance of winning it all, and I unfailingly scoffed and assured them that of course not, that in fact he had a snowball´s chance in hell (or more likely a simplified response adapted to English-language learners).
In October of 2016, just a month before that fateful election, I had a month´s vacation back in the states, and I was right in the thick of election fever. Viewed from the bubble of my Massachusetts liberal friends and family, Hillary Clinton´s impending victory and Trump´s demise seemed practically guaranteed. As my family and I watched the debates, rolling our eyes at The Donald´s rants, and admiring, if not quite being inspired by, Clinton´s competence and knowledge, the election seemed in the bag.
During the same vacation, the scandalous revelation of Trump´s Access Hollywood tape, in which he blatantly boasted of sexually harassing unsuspecting woman, seemed like the nail in the coffin- Michael Dukakis in the tank, Howard Dean yelling Ähh!,¨ Rick Perry saying ¨oops.¨ I successfully voted as part of MA´s early voting option, and returned to Mexico a little more than a week before the election.
In a cozy café in the center of Mexico City on Tuesday Nov. 9, I sipped a chai latte waiting for a date, who, as in typical Mexican fashion, was running late. I checked the election results on my phone, expecting to see that Hillary was leading. To my shock and horror, Trump appeared to be winning. I screamed ¨No!¨in horror. The other customers looked up in bewilderment as I yelled ¨Trump está ganando!¨¨(Trump is winning) and they responded, ¨No manches!¨(roughly ¨no way¨).
As my date finally arrived, what was to have been a relaxing order-pizza-in and watch Netflix kind of night morphed into what unforgettably became dubbed as ¨CNN and Panic.¨ ¨No puede ser!¨ (it can´t be) she repeated over and over, as she bemoaned the fact that her sister was currently was living in Seattle, and worried about the normalizing of anti-Mexican sentiment that seemed likely to follow. At 5:00 AM my time the next morning my horrified mother called me somewhat hysterically, and I decided to begin my 7:00 AM class with a sober acknowledgement of the elephant in the room. Slowly, we all had to adjust to the reality, and remain optimistic. Trump would be El Presidente for at least four years.
The Trump Presidency Seen Across The Border
In January 2017, the Trump Presidency officially started, and almost immediately so did the lies and spin, as his then-Press Secretary Sean Spicer claimed erroneously that Trump´s inauguration crowd was the biggest in history, despite photographic evidence to the contrary. It all seemed like a big joke, but living south of the border, it really didn´t affect my day-to-day life, and honestly I felt blessed to not be living in my country as the most implausible President in modern history presided over it.
I of course kept stock of the news; the outrageous statements, both tweeted and uttered, the shake-ups in the administration which seemed more akin to an episode of The Apprentice than a typical, functional Presidential cabinet. I laughed out loud when seeing photos of Trump staring at a solar eclipse and shook my head in disbelief when Anthony Scaramucci lasted a mere week in his post. Yet everything seemed so distant, it was hard to come to terms with a Trump Presidency while living so many miles away.
What finally really struck a nerve with me while living in Mexico, and for once made the Trump presidency come alive in a visceral way to an expat who was not physically located in the U.S., was the revelation in 2018 that the administration was literally keeping immigrant and refugee children, the vast majority of whom were Latinos, in cages, as the left predictably erupted in a moral outrage while conservatives defended the move.
At the time, I was working in a school for Jewish students in Mexico (yes this exists), and as you can imagine the sight of Mexicans separated in confinement camps did not sit well with Mexicans of Jewish heritage, who were reminded of a certain German dictator´s actions many decades prior. While any comparison of a U.S. leader to a legitimate fascist tyrant will always be a tad overblown, the worst fears of a Trump presidency seemed to be coming true. As much as I seemed shielded from the daily reality of the U.S. under its 45th President, these disheartening events made me feel more righteously engaged (and infuriated). The 2018 Mid-Terms were a slight burst of good news, but I remained skeptical of the chances of one of the 25-odd candidates on the ballots in the 2020 Democratic Primaries to defeat Trump in November.
What Will Come Next?
Although in many ways the COVID 19 Pandemic is an atrocious health and economic crisis, one slight silver lining is that it truly has lessened the possibility of Trump getting re-elected. Although Joe Biden is far from a candidate who elicits the most passionate enthusiasm, his associations with the still-popular and now-missed Barack Obama, and the disillusion over Trump´s handling of the virus and racial protests stoked by the killing of George Floyd, make his victory seem, in this premature moment of 4 months before the election, to be relatively secure.
The rise of populist presidents, from both ends of the ideological spectrum, has been exposed as an ineffective form of governorship, as Mexico, The U.S., and Brazil have all proven ill-equipped to combat COVID 19 thanks to inept leaders who ran on a change-the-status-quo platform. These leaders have chosen to downplay the severity of the crisis as to quell the people´s fear and imply that the economy is of more importance than the public´s health. In reality, I am not happy with the response of both my nation of birth and my adopted country to this pandemic, but at least the looming election, and the apparent feeling that Trump faces a steep battle towards re-election, would be an immediate step in the right direction.
Yet we must remember as Americans, no matter what country we live in, that we can´t assume Trump is doomed, and as a result we simply cannot afford to take his apparently inevitable loss in November for granted. This is exactly what we did in 2016, and this indifference led to his narrow victory against a candidate who was much-criticized but who was infinitely more qualified to lead this powerful nation. For those who would have preferred a more dynamic and progressive candidate like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, do not stay at home or write-in a joke candidate just to spite the DNC.
To those who say Biden is no different than Trump, remember that you are not just voting for the specific candidate, you are voting for who will be sitting on the Supreme Court for the next 30 years. You are voting for policies that will decide to restrict or uphold freedoms for women and racial minorities. You are voting for the Administration that will choose cabinet officials who will protect the environment or strengthen the resources to fight pandemics like the one we are drowning in right now.
For all the American expats around the world, whether they are living in Buenos Aires, Krakow, or Bangkok, remember that the U.S. Presidency is not a strange movie, but stark, grave reality, and the results of any election can drastically alter the fabric of the country you were born in and to which you still maintain an allegiance. I hope that the morning of November 4th I will not be woken up by a frantic phone call. I hope the world can start that day with a sigh of relief, and a little bit of optimism for the future.
