Trumpian Mimicry in Mexico? Telenovela and Tabloid Star Eduardo Verástegui Makes a Bid for President
Tabloid fixtures are making their way into presidential bids around the New World. Is there a playbook here?
Yesterday, former telenovela and boyband star Eduardo Verástegui announced his intentions to get on the ballot to run for president in México. You might know his name from the recent box office hit, “Sound of Freedom,” a dramatic film he produced loosely based on a controversial organization that liberates victims of child sex trafficking, starring the actor who played Jesus in Mel Gibson’s “Passion of the Christ.”
Verástegui is not a mega-star in Mexico — he isn’t some Acapulco Shore (think Jersey Shore) character and he doesn’t have the fame of other actors like Eugenio Derbez. He is more seen as a blip in the tabloid papers, a curious personality targeted by ragmags claiming he had a romance with Ricky Martin before he turned to religiosity and daily YouTube rosary sessions.
Yet for the past several years, Verástegui has been found on the campaign trail for American Republicans like Kari Lake (a former TV anchor) in Arizona or Donald Trump (a TV star and tabloid guru). In recent months, he has been seen promoting his movie with Argentinian presidential hopeful Javier Milei, known for his Beatles-esque lambchops and own tabloid history (think free love and tantric sex). Trump had Verástegui at one of his country clubs for a private viewing, which Steve Bannon attended. Verástegui has also teamed up with “Bitcoin president” of El Salvador Nayib Bukele. B-list TV personalities and crypto hypemen seem to be taking over politics — for so-called “polite” society (whatever the hell that is these days) these are the kinds of people you’d expect on a National Enquirer cover.
Verástegui doesn’t have much of a chance to win the presidency this time around — but he can certainly impact the discourse of the election in June 2024. In an important election year for both Mexico and the United States, these tone-setting is important to follow.
My plea to Failure to Communicate readers is this: be careful of the characters you give your attention to in media, particularly tabloid media. Don’t be surprised when one day they run for president.
Network
I first became aware of Verástegui when I covered CPAC México for CODA, a great publication focused on global crises. CPAC is a conference for conservatives that has happened in the US since Reagan. Seeing this brand of carnivalesque Right-Wing culture in Mexico felt a little odd. So many of the people I covered in my dissertation were there in person or over video, like Steve Bannon and influencer Jack Posobiec. Donald Trump addressed the crowd via video and ex-president Jair Bolsonaro’s son Eduardo rallied the troops. The “nationalist internationale” was on full display. I won’t rehash CPAC México because you can read it here — including about the Madrid Charter they all signed onto at a right-wing Vox Party meeting in Spain.
When Verástegui announced his movie Sound of Freedom at CPAC México, I found it interesting and a bit alarming to see outside of the US. Yes, the film crew started working on the movie long before QAnon was even a word, but clearly the “elites ignoring mass child rape” theme can appeal to certain strains of the emergent make-your-own-conspiracy-adventure Internet movement. I’m used to this in the US. But Mexico?
Watching Verástegui roll out the film with edgy politicos all over Latin America and the New World — from Bukele to Milei — made me think about the network of charismatic personalities utilizing salacious plotlines and scandalous conspiracies to grab attention and create urgency in their candidacies.
There feels like an emerging playbook in the tabloid-to-politics pipeline. Trump of course is a famous tabloid fixture. A historian will tell you that charismatic entertainers, carnival barkers, and confidence men have been part of American politics for most of its history — bet you didn’t know circus entrepreneur P.T. Barnum was the mayor of Bridgeport, Connecticut and a member of the Connecticute legislature!
Even so, when a group of these television or social media famous characters unite across international lines, forming a New World coalition of charismatic outsider candidates, united around ideas of international child sex trafficking cartels which are put forth in a Hollywood movie, I pay attention. This style of network feels unique.
Political Style From Tabloid Style
Probably one of the best resources on Verástegui I know is Jonathan Krohn, a researcher and journalist in Mexico City who I ran into at CPAC México. Krohn has emphasized the power of Verástegui’s bid is less in his ability to win, and more in his capacity to impact the style and discourse of Mexican politics. When his work comes out, read it.
What I’ve gathered from conversations with Krohn, is this is another step in a path towards a popular politics, a stardom politics, a politics that pulls people away from the trudgery of real politik power struggles (labor, welfare, security) and towards a kind of fantasical politic —where the problems aren’t just paychecks, cartel violence, and civil rights, but MASS CHILD RAPE that is being COVERED UP by elites. It is a politics of epic Hollywood proportions that captures our imagination and attention, pulling them both away from other issues less grave or fetishistic, but incredibly potent in our daily lives. This kind of hallucinatory, end times kind of politics can really make you feel powerless to stop this mass conspiracy… unless of course you vote for the pretty man outsider candidate from the movies. This is how populist charismatic leaders are born.
Take Tabloid Seriously
A significant part of my dissertation is a plea for scholars, organizers, voters and political mavericks to take tabloid seriously as a pipeline for politics. Verástegui’s run is one of many proofs of this pipeline. Democracy, afterall, is not necessarily some kind of staid, polite endeavor with a super clean process. It’s often a messy conversation with the masses about who we think we are, who we want to be, and how we should go about being and doing it.
Plenty of folks think of tabloid as a rag mag gossip column, a kind of twisted simulacrum of journalism — pieces of truth wrapped in ongoing sagas with beautiful people and terrible hedonism. I prefer to think of tabloid as a broader cultural style that exists in many forms of media — online, print, sport, commentary, radio. It is a style that grabs our attention, our imaginations, and our aspirations.
Sensational tabloid stories allow readers — often times working class folks in the grocery store check-out— to play with definitions of reality, to try on alternative explanations for why things are the way they are, to “wonder if it was so,” as tabloid scholar S. Elizabeth Bird has described the purpose of tabloid newspapers. Tabloids are a source of imagination and speculative explanation for a world of increasing complexity.
The facts and statistics around human trafficking (which is often not just around sex, but other forms of labor) are murky. Yet when you try on certain realities, you start to wonder. What if there were networks of narco-human-traffickers subjecting children to rape “10 to 15 times a day?” What if we elected someone who cared about this terrible system? What if the people in power — for decades— knew this and did nothing to stop it, like many other terrible things happening out there? What if we got an outsider we have known and loved for years — in television and music — to save us? The way he saves people on TV?
Tabloid gives us pictures, people, and storylines of what could be. It is only a matter of time before those characters step out of the pages of tabloid and cinema screens, and into the pages of The New York Times and history.