Dr. Alfredo Cuéllar

The former president who turned deceit into strategy and ignorance into a flag. How much longer can American democracy endure this farce?

The Art of Lying Without Shame
Donald Trump embodies the greatest experiment in political manipulation of our era: a man who preaches the defense of the people while dismantling the institutions that protect them. He speaks of freedom while sowing fear; calls himself a patriot while undermining the democracy that made him possible.

His discourse is a succession of contradictions that no longer surprise anyone, yet continue shaping millions of wills. He lies compulsively, but does so with a confidence his followers mistake for authenticity. He claims to defend workers, yet his policies favor the wealthy. He despises science, ridicules education, and glorifies ignorance as if it were a patriotic virtue. In his world, knowledge is a threat and intellectuals are enemies of the people.

Chaos as Strategy
Trump’s contradictions are not the result of confusion—they are a tactic. As he admitted in a 1997 interview, “It’s always good to make things nice and complicated so nobody can figure them out.”
In that apparent incoherence lies his method: to confuse in order to dominate. Contradiction becomes his shield. He changes his stance according to the audience, denies what he said, and in doing so, erases any stable notion of truth.

His chaotic discourse is not disorder; it is a deliberate technique of saturation. By flooding the public sphere with falsehoods, he erodes society’s collective ability to distinguish fact from fabrication. That is his micropolitics of power: controlling common sense through noise.

Abuse Turned into Spectacle
Trump has achieved the unthinkable: turning abuse into spectacle. His trials, insults, and lies are part of a carefully staged theater designed to keep the public’s attention and intimidate opponents.

But his authoritarianism was not limited to words. During his presidency, he ordered the purge of the civil service, replacing career officials with inexperienced loyalists. He issued executive orders that politicized regulatory agencies—from the EPA to the Department of Justice—undermining their autonomy. By demanding personal loyalty over institutional competence, he transformed the state into a stage for political servitude. His current circle of advisers remains a gallery of obedient but inept vassals.

Violence as Method
His darkest legacy is the violence he normalized. Under his nationalist rhetoric, immigrants became scapegoats, blamed for every social ill. He insulted them, persecuted them, harassed and separated families, and encouraged law enforcement to treat them as enemies.

Cruelty ceased to be an excess and became public policy. His contempt for the law is systematic: he ignores court rulings, pressures prosecutors, and reduces the rule of law to a personal weapon.

He took this authoritarian logic even further by using the National Guard as a tool of political punishment, deploying it not where security was needed, but where he could showcase force and humiliate opponents. Trump does not seek to protect cities; he chooses them as examples—as trophies in his symbolic war against diversity, dissent, and free thought.

The Complicity of Silence
Yet the most serious issue is not Trump himself but the tolerance surrounding him. The complicit silence of those who, out of fear or calculation, allow him to advance. Those who say, “Don’t provoke him,” as if a demagogue required permission to destroy. Those who justify each excess for electoral convenience. All of them are accomplices, in greater or lesser measure.

Where Are the Democrats?
It would be unfair to ignore that there has been institutional resistance: lawsuits by state attorneys general against his executive orders, Congressional resolutions condemning abuses of power, and even bipartisan letters demanding transparency in his policies.

However, the lack of narrative cohesion and moral leadership turned those efforts into isolated gestures. The defense of the rule of law was fragmented—lacking the symbolic strength needed to counter his populism.

Trump is the disease, but Democratic indifference and fragmentation are the symptoms of a weakened system. It is not enough to wait for him to self-destruct. He must be confronted with intelligence, dignity, and truth.

Epilogue: Civilization at Risk
If knowledge, science, education, compassion, and respect for human dignity once again become enemies of power, then it is not only democracy that is in danger—it is civilization itself.

For when lies are normalized and decency is mocked, the future ceases to be written with reason and begins to be written with fear.

Dr. Alfredo Cuéllar: Pioneer of Micropolitics, former Harvard professor, and contributor to: DEBATEX and ARJE News Mexico. Comments: alfredocuellar@me.com