Global Health in the Age of Trumpism

Abstract

All human endeavors -even the most noble and carefully crafted- are, at some point, destined for transformation or failure, whether total or partial. Global Health is no exception. Almost nothing we envision unfolds exactly as projected, and it falls to those of us who care about these causes to reorient them in order to keep their spirit alive; to treat them with a proper diagnosis, without allowing their enemies to let them die quietly in bed, and recognizing that saving them often requires transforming them.

I once heard a Colombian poet say that he hoped his epitaph would read: “There is nothing and no one who has not disappointed me”. At this stage of a professional life in Public Health, while many colleagues still seem enthusiastic about the promises and possibilities of social movements, others of us drift toward skepticism, always striving to prevent it from turning into cynicism or indifference. Instead, we try to turn those doubts into a new kind of hope: to imagine other possible futures ⁽¹⁾; perhaps new ways of being disappointed, but which, while they last and insofar as they are honest, move the needle of change.

This is how I think about Global Health, which had already disappointed me even before it came under such open attack from nationalist movements. Many of us have long identified its contradictions and shortcomings, particularly within the mechanisms of international cooperation. Several of these are now being exploited by discourses such as Trumpism (understood here not only as a U.S. phenomenon, but as a broader expression of anti-institutional, anti-elite nationalism) to dismantle what should, in fact, be transformed.