Breathe
By Sofía Guadarrama
Beautiful, great, incredible, fantastic, fantastic, amazing, awesome, terrific, unbelievable, super, excellent, magnificentare just some of the words used by the current president of the United States, Donald Trump, to praise the people around him and who, of course, he wants to seduce. Just watch and listen to him speak at his conferences from the Oval Office.
He is a seducer. And he takes advantage of that power to deceive his electoral base with foolishness and follies that excite many and infuriate others. One day he proclaims that there is freedom of expression in his government and the next he prevents a journalist from entering the Oval Office for writing "Gulf of Mexico" and not "Gulf of America" in his journalistic notes. It is difficult to keep up with a man who intends to buy the Gaza Strip and Greenland, as if they were a couple of houses in Florida, but at the same time is negotiating the cessation of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, this, of course, to weaken Europe, NATO and take over the Ukrainian mines.
Sometimes he gives the impression that he has no idea what he is doing and signs decrees on the spur of the moment without stopping for a minute to analyze them. What if the paper straws... Decree. Back to plastic! What if the almost 1,600 people prosecuted for the assault on the Capitol... Decree. Pardons! What if COVID vaccines are mandatory in government schools... Decretazo. Ban them!
The truth is that he knows perfectly well what he is doing: AMLO calls it politicking. In Mexico we know it as populism.
Today, millions of people are certain that Donald Trump is a danger to the world. I think so, too. He has the power to start a Third World War and, if things get worse, to drop one or more atomic bombs at a time of his choosing. This power is based on the Doctrine of Command Responsibility, which authorizes him to use nuclear weapons to protect the nation. Fortunately for us, the latter is highly unlikely and Donald Trump will only be in office for 4 years. But Elon Musk will still be around like most billionaires in America.
Sure, he's not the first billionaire to have had significant influence on presidential administrations or to try to impose his agenda, as have many from John D. Rockefeller to Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Michael Bloomberg and Jeff Bezos. But none of them like Elon Musk.
The richest man on the planet does not have the same seductive power as Donald Trump, but he has one of the world's most important social networks, SpaceX - which has received more than $13 billion in NASA contracts - and now control of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a temporary initiative created by President Donald Trump, scheduled to end on July 4, 2026, whose goal is to restructure federal agencies to maximize government efficiency, reduce spending and excessive regulations, and eliminate waste.
