By: Raymond Dimayuga
US President Donald Trump, by his own logic, should also be abducted and replaced. Not necessarily a call for action. But a mirror. A deliberately uncomfortable one. It reflects the internal contradiction of interventionist moral reasoning, where authoritarianism is condemned abroad while excused, minimized, or normalized at home.
When Trump justified hardline actions against leaders like Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, the argument rested on a familiar moral scaffold: authoritarian practices, democratic erosion, suppression of dissent. The implication was simple. Leaders who violate democratic norms forfeit legitimacy. From that premise follows an unstated but powerful corollary: legitimacy is conditional, not inherent. It is earned and can be lost.
But logic, unlike politics, does not recognize borders.
If authoritarian behavior is the standard for delegitimization, then the standard must apply universally or it collapses into convenience. Trump’s own record invites that scrutiny. Attacks on the press as “enemies of the people,” open admiration for strongmen, refusal to commit to peaceful transfers of power, and the normalization of executive overreach all echo the very traits used to condemn foreign autocrats. The difference is not qualitative, but geographic.
This is where the argument sharpens. If Trump’s justification for intervening against Maduro is that democracy must be protected from leaders who undermine it, then consistency demands that the same logic be turned inward. Otherwise, the moral claim reveals itself as selective enforcement masquerading as principle.
The phrase “should also be abducted and replaced” functions as reductio ad absurdum. It pushes the logic to an extreme to expose its flaw. Democracies do not survive by kidnapping leaders. Authoritarianism is not cured by authoritarian means. If removing a leader without due process is wrong at home, it cannot become righteous simply because it happens elsewhere.
The deeper issue is not Trump versus Maduro. It is the dangerous elasticity of moral language in geopolitics. Words like “democracy,” “freedom,” and “authoritarianism” become tools rather than values, deployed when useful and discarded when inconvenient. In that framework, power determines morality, not the other way around.
True democratic commitment is boring, procedural, and often unsatisfying. It insists on elections even when the wrong people win, on institutions even when they obstruct, and on limits even when power is available. Anything less is not democracy defended, but democracy instrumentalized.
Thus, US President Donald Trump, by his own logic, should also be abducted and replaced. The statement’s provocation forces a reckoning. Either authoritarianism is unacceptable everywhere, including when it wears familiar colors and speaks in nationalist slogans, or the condemnation of foreign strongmen is merely theater.
Logic, once unleashed, is ruthless. If we do not like where it leads, the solution is not to silence it, but to abandon the hypocrisy that summoned it in the first place.