Stephen Bannon’s hunt for an Irish Trump will fail, we think, because we are better at calling out hypocrisy. We are too savvy, too historically wounded, to tolerate the moral stench of brazenly contradictory positions that are matters of life and death. Even a child can see that Donald Trump has camouflaged a naked oil grab against Venezuela as cocaine trafficking charges. So far, so Trump.

But what leaves us slack-jawed is the hypocrisy; the fact that just a month ago, he pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, a former Honduran president convicted in the US on near identical charges to those levelled against Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, who was no more than 18 months into a 45-year sentence.

As president, Hernandez was central to a drug-trafficking scheme characterised by US authorities as “one of the largest and most violent drug-trafficking conspiracies in the world”, using the blood money to fund his political campaigns. He was deemed responsible for the “unfathomable destruction” cocaine had caused in the US, for flooding the country with over 400 tonnes of cocaine – equivalent to roughly 4.5 billion individual doses – and for turning his own country into one of the world’s most violent countries with one of the highest murder rates, according to the US state department data.

Trump merely saw another crucified victim like himself. “The man that I pardoned was, if you could equate it to us, he was treated like the Biden administration treated a man named Trump. This was a man who was........

© The Irish Times