Quote of the Day (Mario Vargas Llosa, on ‘The Enthronement…of a Monstrous Lie’)

“He couldn’t remember how it began, the first doubts, conjectures, discrepancies that led him to wonder if everything really was going so well, or if, behind the facade of a country that under the severe but inspired leadership of an extraordinary statesman was moving ahead at a quickstep, lay a grim spectacle of people destroyed, mistreated, and deceived, the enthronement, through propaganda and violence, of a monstrous lie.”—Peruvian novelist, Nobel Literature laureate, and politician Mario Vargas Llosa (1936-2025), The Feast of the Goat, translated by Edith Grossman (2000)

Over the course of his long career, Mario Vargas Llosa disappointed a number of his readers with his gradual drift from leftist politics to something more like free-market conservatism. But unlike so many in the MAGA movement in the United States, he drew the line at Donald Trump.

In 2016, he denounced the then-candidate as a “clown” and a “racist.” In an interview two years later with the Argentine daily Clarin (reprinted online following his death two weeks ago, in Worldcrunch), he was even more emphatic:

“Nobody had managed before to vote in a populist, a philistine and a demagogue like Trump. What does that show us? That no society, not even the most advanced ones in terms of legality and democracy, is immune to populism and nationalism. Trump’s legacy for the United States will end up being very negative.”

Over 1,100 anti-Trump protests are expected today. That’s a paltry number compared to the size of the challenge he poses now to the American republic, but it’s a start. Otherwise, we risk seeing the “grim spectacle of people destroyed, mistreated, and deceived” that Llosa warned about in the rise of Latin American authoritarian regimes.