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Last week we saw the culmination of Trump’s four years in the White House, with the invasion of the Capitol sparked by the outgoing president himself. It will take years, perhaps decades, to cure the United States of America of hatred and for the country to once again discuss humanity’s great problems, such as climate change.
But that’s not how it started. It all started with the destruction of the political debate, and there is a figure in Portugal who has copied this Trumpist strategy in presidential debates: André Ventura.
Let’s look at 10 topics Ventura imitated Trump on and how dangerous it can be for our country:
- Coup support. Since November, Trump has insisted that he won the US election and, on the day Joe Biden was formally named president, he decided to hold a rally in front of the White House urging his supporters to carry out a ‘coup’. The result was four deaths. André Ventura supported the election of Trump from the first hour, even saying that “if victory is confirmed this morning, democracy will win in the world” and that “if Biden wins, God have mercy on us.”
- Hide your processes with justice. Trump hasn’t paid taxes in a decade, and despite promising to provide evidence to the contrary, he has never filed his tax returns. In Portugal, and despite being interrogated several times, we still do not know why the Judicial Police searched André Ventura’s office.
- Fake news. Trump’s advisers coined a new way of writing the word “lie” by calling it “alternative facts.” For four years, Donald Trump has shown that fake news they were a strategy to stay in power. In fact, he continues to put it into practice by claiming that the elections were “stolen,” a narrative that led to the invasion of the Capitol by his supporters. Ventura, for his part, is capable of defending everything and its opposite, as evidence accumulating three salaries with the function of deputy, despite having promised that it would remain exclusive.
- Trolls on social media. In recent days, Trump has been banned from Twitter and Facebook, but the resigned president has always used an army of fake online accounts to defend his ideas. In Portugal, several journalistic investigations associate thousands of ghost profiles with the Chega party.
- Rule for the rich. With Trump in the White House, American billionaires have made a billion dollars in wealth from tax cuts. André Ventura defended in Portugal a fixed IRS rate that, according to the Polygraph, “benefits the rich and harms ordinary families.”
- Negotiate climate change. Thanks to the president’s action, the US abandoned the Paris Agreement and cut funds from all public bodies to study and combat climate change. Ventura, for his part, voted against all motions to salute the Climate Strike, with thousands of students outside the Assembly of the Republic demanding a fight against the Climate Emergency.
- Racism and xenophobia. Trump never condemned the police violence that killed George Floyd and other black people in recent years in the United States, but said that the Black Lives Matter movement was a symbol of hatred. Ventura did exactly the same: when Cláudia Simões was beaten by the police, and although the agent was accused of the assault, the president of Chega defended that the police action had been “legitimate”. And just as Trump chose Mexicans to create an internal enemy, Ventura never tires of creating stigmas on the Roma community.
- Covid-19 devaluation. The US president decided never to protect his people from the pandemic, devaluing the use of the mask, resisting containment measures, attacking the guidelines of the health authorities or even falling into the ridicule of proposing the “injection of disinfectant” into the body of people to eliminate the virus. André Ventura also attacked the Director General of Health, Graça Freitas, and the Chega Congress did not comply with safety regulations.
- Human rights. The final days of Trump’s term were marked by accelerating executions of death sentences, contrary to what was a tradition among outgoing presidents. In Portugal, Ventura has defended life imprisonment or chemical castration, measures that go against fundamental rights.
- Neo-Nazi support. David Duke, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, expressed his support for Donald Trump from the beginning and underscored the overwhelming importance of the “white vote” for his election. In Portugal, Ventura has the support of Mário Machado, founder and former leader of the neo-Nazi Hammerskins Portugal faction.
Trumpism is a political strategy, first devised by Steve Bannon (Trump’s former adviser), that destroys the political debate and uses tricks to keep the media constantly promoting the candidate. Only now, after the invasion of the Capitol, have we seen prominent right-wing commentators and politicians defending the resigned US president, but in Portugal Trumpism is very much alive in André Ventura, as we saw in the presidential debates. Therefore, if we have already ‘seen this movie’, we know the dangers of democracy and we know how it ends, we have an obligation not to fall into the trap.
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