TRUMP is easy to dislike. He has a boorish style, an attitude toward the world that in a sweep tosses out the niceties of diplomacy and international law. One way or the other, we are going to have Greenland, he said in mid-January 2026; I do believe I will have the honour of taking Cuba, he said in March. Vulgarities like these have not been seen in public for a very long time, perhaps since before 1945, for in the period since then such imperial longings have been masked behind words such as ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’.

Donald Trump likes to win. He made that clear in his 1987 book, The Art of the Deal, where he writes about how he likes to ‘think big’ and ‘win big’. What Trump dislikes is a ‘loser’, a word that he uses frequently in The Art of the Deal, and which he deploys in his conversations to mark the character of people he dislikes. In recent years, it has meant everything to Trump that he wins elections (his loss to Joe Biden in 2020 rattled him so much that he refused to accept the result).

WHEN the new year began, no-one anticipated that events would begin to move at a supersonic speed. Before the world’s billions can digest one issue – the kidnapping of the President of Venezuela – the United States and its allies moved on rapidly to another – the suffocation of the Cuban Revolution, and then the bombing of Iran. Each issue required information and thought, deep consideration of the complexity of each of these actions of the US and its hyper-imperialist bloc.

In January 2026, US President Donald Trump declared Cuba to be an ‘unusual and extraordinary threat’ to US security – a designation that allows the United States government to use sweeping economic restrictions traditionally reserved for national security adversaries. The US blockade against Cuba began in the 1960s, right after the Cuban Revolution of 1959 but has tightened over the years.

FOR the first time in the history of independent Bangladesh, Jamaat-e-Islami believes that a genuine possibility of victory has opened up before it. Even if it does not win outright, it is set to emerge as a powerful opposition force.