Thinkers, Rhodes, Greece, 2006. (Riccardo Romano, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Special to Consortium News

I spent the past two weeks on my ancestral island of Rhodes, Greece, helping my cousin settle his late father’s estate. It’s no surprise that everybody — and I mean literally everybody — wanted to talk about this month’s U.S. presidential election. 

Greece has long had an anti-American streak stemming from U.S. support for the 1967-1974 military dictatorship that killed, tortured, and imprisoned thousands of people just because of their political views. Indeed, the governing conservative New Democracy Party (ND) wins elections only because there are so many socialist and communist parties that they split the left-wing vote and allow the conservatives to govern.

But much to my surprise, every leftist I’ve spoken to, including just about everybody in my own family from the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) to the Socialist Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) has offered full-throated support to Donald Trump.

After hearing this over and over again, I decided to probe a little to get to the bottom of how lifelong socialists and communists can support a billionaire businessman who leads a capitalist and conservative political party. But the reasons for their admiration of Trump were quite simple. They saw Donald Trump as the anti-war candidate. 

They hate what is happening to the Palestinians and Lebanese, despite the fact that their government is unabashedly pro-Israel (as is Donald Trump.) They hate that the United States has armed one Orthodox Christian country, Ukraine, against another, Russia. And they hate that the United States has done nothing about the 50-year-long Turkish military occupation of Cyprus. 

The Greeks genuinely believe that if anybody is going to end the Ukraine war or tell the Israelis to stop killing civilians in Palestine and Lebanon, it’s going to be Donald Trump. (I disagree strongly that Trump has any love whatsoever for the Palestinians. Indeed, he’s been Benjamin Netanyahu’s lapdog for years.)

But the Greeks argue that Democrats have only made the international situation worse, so why not give Trump another chance to make things better, like he did with North Korea, at least temporarily.

Immigration 

Trump, in Yuma, Arizona, in June 2020, walking along the completed 200th mile of the border wall with Mexico. (White House/Shealah Craighead)

There’s another issue that the Greeks agree with Trump on, too. That’s the issue of immigration. The Greeks are well known for their hospitality. There’s even a word for it: Filoxenia, which means “love of the stranger.” 

When Afghanistan and Iraq began falling apart, private Greek citizens actually stood on the beaches to welcome them as they washed ashore in rafts and to give them food and clothes. That changed when the European Union gave Turkey billions of dollars to hold refugees in Turkey and the Turks instead began forcing them across the border into Greece and just pocketing the money.

The Greeks, in turn, built a wall along the land border with Turkey. That enraged the Turks, of course, but the wall actually worked. And when Trump started talking about building a wall along the southern border with Mexico, the Greeks were all in. 

As a progressive American voter, and a truly independent one at that, I’m not optimistic about the next four years. Abortion is of primary importance to me. So are the environment, workers rights, health care and education. I support easier immigration and an easier and quicker path to citizenship. Donald Trump will likely destroy all of that.

With that said, I believe that there are two areas where Trump is right.  One is his support for a less interventionist foreign policy. The other is criminal justice reform. Trump issued a lot of pardons when he was president. He issued a lot of commutations. And he worked to do something about the sentencing disparities between white people convicted of crimes compared to people of color. At least there was that.

Donald Trump already has served one term as president. Consequently, he’ll be a lame duck beginning the moment he takes the oath of office on Jan. 20 with nobody on Capitol Hill owing him anything. He’ll be permanently out of office in four years. 

Is it possible that we could be pleasantly surprised, then, on some of these issues? I expect to be far more disappointed than anything else. But I don’t want to be a Debbie Downer. I’m going to try to convince myself that some good will come of this. I don’t know exactly what it’ll be.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Kiriakou is a former C.I.A. counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act—a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration’s torture program.