Can We Now Admit Trump Was Right About Haiti?

It is the very definition of a failed state.

It’s a sad commentary on the current state of things that we look back on 2018 as “the good old days.” By comparison, that year was pretty good compared to this one on a number of metrics; however, by no objective criterion would that be a year regular Americans should pine for.

After all, in 2018 we had an establishment Republican House speaker who retired on active duty amid differences with a Republican president. We had a grinding, fraudulent investigation of that president over spurious allegations that he’d colluded with the Russians to fix the 2016 presidential election, allegations we now know were made up out of whole cloth by a seditious conspiracy of Democrat operatives. And though the Mueller investigation ultimately cleared Donald Trump of any Russian collusion — the Durham investigation later documented the conspiracy to defraud the American people and ultimately create the Mueller probe — the conspirators still managed to monetize the fake Russia charges in the midterm elections that fall by riding them into a turnover of the uninspiring Republican majority in the House of Representatives.

Beyond the soon-to-conclude-without-result Mueller probe, one reason why the 2018 elections went so badly for Republicans was a perceived exhaustion on the part of the voting public with a never-ending series of controversies enmeshing Trump. Perhaps the stupidest of those involved his characterization of the island (or half-island) nation of Haiti, which he was said to have referred to as a “shithole country.”

This was in the context of a meeting regarding immigration.

It’s been a fairly established bipartisan consensus, at least until 15 minutes ago, that immigration from Haiti was considerably less desirable than from any other country. For all the smarmy moralizing that word of Trump’s unkind reference engendered, which included such histrionics as Don Lemon and Michael Steele calling Trump a “racist,” Conan O’Brien all but selling T-shirts proclaiming Haiti’s national greatness, and Stephen Colbert claiming that Haiti couldn’t be a shithole because Donald Trump wasn’t its president, the proof of Haiti’s shithole status is overwhelming.

And it has nothing to do with race. Haiti is a shithole by African standards, by Caribbean standards, by Latin American standards — in fact, by any standard you’d like to impose.

I could take you through the statistical proof. For example, I could show you that Haiti’s per capita income is a breathtakingly low $1,745.90 as of 2022, according to the World Bank, or I could point to studies indicating that the mean IQ of Haitian schoolchildren hovers below 70. (The U.S. military used to, and perhaps still does, refuse to admit anyone with an IQ below 83, based on a conclusion that those unfortunates with scores so low couldn’t be trained to do even the most menial jobs the armed services needed done. By the way, 82 or below would grade out around the 10th percentile among U.S. military test-takers.)

Perhaps the most obvious proof Haiti is a shithole country comes from the fact that its neighbor, the Dominican Republic, with whom Haiti shares the island of Hispaniola, has built a wall along the full length of the border between the two countries to keep the Haitians out.

No, I’m not kidding:

The Dominicans have actually become a nice little success story of economic development over the past three or four decades, as they’ve climbed out of the gutter and built a vibrant, growing economy with something that looks like the rule of law and a reasonably functional power grid and transportation infrastructure. Investment has come in, tourist dollars are up, and the DR is no longer a basket case.

I mention this not to sing the praises of the Dominican Republic so much as to note how poorly Haiti performs. The Great Dominican Wall went up years after Trump’s descriptive remark about Haiti, and it went up for a pretty good reason.

In July 2021, three years after Trump had been excoriated for calling a shithole a shithole and just months after Trump left office — and those legacy corporate media prattlers were lecturing America about a “return to norms” following a “fortified” election — Haitian President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated by a small army of Colombian mercenaries working on behalf of ambitious Haitian dissidents. Moïse, who on one hand was attempting to fight corruption in Haiti but, on the other, had engendered a constitutional crisis by remaining in office beyond his term, might have been the last true president of the country. His prime minister, Ariel Henry, assumed power but has never really wielded it.

In fact, so empty is Henry’s pen that last week, when Haiti collapsed anew, he was in Kenya attempting unsuccessfully to beg that country’s government for 1,000 military policemen to keep the armed gangs from overpowering his own troops. He attempted to fly home but couldn’t, owing to the fact that the gangs now control the airport in Port-au-Prince. Henry was further told by the Dominicans that he wasn’t welcome to land in Santo Domingo, either, which tells you how it looks when someone builds a wall and is damned serious about patrolling it. He’s now in Puerto Rico inventorying his offshore bank accounts and plotting retirement in exile.

The true power in Haiti is held by the warlords.

The most prominent is a gang leader named Jimmy Chérizier, who is better known by the moniker “Barbeque,” owing to his penchant for burning his victims alive. Video of Chérizier’s minions eating the body parts of their enemies has made it onto the internet, though you won’t find links here.

We do try to keep some standards, after all.

Chérizier also recently sacked a couple of Haiti’s prisons, leading to the release of almost 4,000 of the most dangerous psychopaths on planet Earth. Think about how badly you have to behave to go to prison in a place like Haiti. Armed with the grateful allegiance of the sprung, Chérizier is now threatening civil war as the flaming bodies pile up in the streets.

Haiti is the very definition of a failed state — although, to be fair, it has never been much of a “state” in the first place. Haiti won its nominal independence from France two centuries-plus ago after a slave revolt began in 1791, led by a heroic figure named Toussaint Louverture. That revolt was born of a pagan ritual in which the participants were asked to drink the blood of a slaughtered pig, and before long it had resulted in the destruction of some 1,500 plantations on the island, at a massive death toll. Louverture is heralded as a freer of slaves, which he was, but he also burned down most of Haiti’s cities as a measure of opposition to the French soldiers sent to restore some sense of order to the island.

In other words, the Haitians celebrate a man whose definitive accomplishment was to destroy everything of economic viability in his country and leave it permanently destitute.

Louverture died in a French prison in 1803, having been betrayed by his own people. Thus began a tradition of Haitians betraying other Haitians that has lived unbroken ever since.

Of course, you will hear again and again that Haiti’s plight is the fault of Europeans and Americans. Much has been made of the crushing debt imposed on Haiti, first by France as a de-facto price of its independence, and later by American banks. Of course, a main reason for Haiti’s balance of payments problems is that the country’s leaders are the most kleptocratic in the world, and it doesn’t take a particularly high IQ to realize that when you’re in control of a government and that government can borrow untold sums from rich Westerners, and you can then loot those sums from the treasury without being on the hook for paying any of it back, two things are true.

First, that the port improvements, highways, utility infrastructure, drainage, and other things that debt is supposed to produce either are not made or are of such substandard quality as to do no good.

And second, the next round of refinancing of that crushing debt will not come at the most favorable rates.

Not that it matters, because no Haitian leader has ever fully interested himself in paying off the country’s debt anyway.

And now, paying off debt is so far beyond the capabilities of anyone who might aspire to Haiti’s leadership as to make a joke of the subject. We’re literally at the point where the Haitians hope their next president isn’t a cannibal or, at least, that the executions of his enemies by matches and gasoline don’t take place on busy streetcorners or university quadrangles. Guy Philippe, a participant in the 2004 coup that deposed former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and who was recently deported from the U.S. to Port-au-Prince after serving a prison term for laundering drug money, is being touted as the next Great Haitian Hope.

At the end of the day, the Haitians are out of excuses for the shitholery of their country. Particularly when the favored president of our own shithole elites is deploying Marines to our embassy in Port-au-Prince, presumably to keep our diplomats from being barbecued by its burgeoning new leadership.