The White House is capitalising on the chaos in Spain. Its relations with Sánchez and Morocco are a factor

Whilst thousands of Moroccan migrants were being escorted by the Spanish army back across the border into Morocco – according to the Spanish Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, almost 25,000 people had already returned voluntarily yesterday, having found neither a place to sleep nor food in the exclave of Ceuta – US President Donald Trump was commenting in real time on the images being broadcast relentlessly on Fox News: “It’s terrible. Remember those images,” he said. “That will be us in three years’ time if the wrong side wins.”

Sudden crises, with powerful images such as those from Ceuta, lend themselves to the manipulation of information, the spread of fake news and disinformation: many have an interest in doing so, for example Russia and the European far-right populists, but there is also a certain appeal within the ranks of the ‘Make America Great Again’ Republicans.

Trump said that, with the Democrats in government, Americans “would not have a very good life”, emphasising his administration’s original priority, which links immigration management to internal security and the quality of life of Americans. Stephen Miller, the long-standing architect of Trump’s restrictive immigration policies and the man behind the wall with Mexico, also reposted a video on social media yesterday showing clashes at the Ceuta border, accusing the Democrats of having caused a similar situation in the United States during the Biden administration. He, too, claimed that if they were to regain the White House, they would do so “on a vastly greater scale”, allowing Americans’ homes to be “invaded and taken away”. This is how the images from the Spanish border at Ceuta were easily transformed into a means of reaffirming the idea that migrants pose not merely an administrative threat, but an existential one, and that only a more aggressive control policy can prevent similar situations – a narrative that is proving effective at a time when polls show a weakening of support for Trump, with his approval rating averaging around 38 per cent across surveys and some recent polls even placing him in the 30 per cent range, four months ahead of the mid-term elections.

But there is also another reason why Trump supporters have an interest in using Ceuta politically, and it concerns relations with Pedro Sánchez’s Spain and King Muhammad VI’s Morocco. In recent years, relations between Washington and Rabat have intensified, to say the least: last Sunday, Trump made a surprise announcement on his social media platform ‘Truth’ that Morocco would be naming a section of the Tiznit-Dakhla motorway after him, thanking the king and saying he was looking forward to driving along it ‘one day’ (a report never confirmed by Rabat, but which, according to some analysts, could be linked to the 2030 FIFA World Cup – which Morocco will co-host with Spain and Portugal – and the ambition to host the final). Two days earlier, the US Trade and Development Agency had agreed to fund preliminary studies for an ammonia production project in Western Sahara. It was Trump himself, in 2020 during his first term, who made the United States the first Western country to recognise Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara – a recognition never revoked by Biden – and who also sponsored a UN resolution in favour of Morocco’s autonomy plan. That decision had, from the outset, been explicitly taken to facilitate Morocco’s entry into the Abraham Accords, but it had also contributed to a deterioration in relations between Washington and Algeria. When Spain subsequently backed Rabat’s projects in Western Sahara, the diplomatic situation worsened further, with Madrid forced to make a considerable diplomatic effort to maintain relations with both Morocco and Algeria.

To further complicate matters, there is a detail from a report published last April by the House Committee on Appropriations – the powerful budget committee of the US House of Representatives – which described Ceuta and Melilla as cities “administered by Spain” but “located on Moroccan territory” – a formulation that echoes almost word for word Rabat’s historical claim to the two Spanish exclaves. The report also contained a passage critical of Madrid, which was accused of having closed its airspace and allied bases to US operations against Iran. This was a direct message to the Sánchez government, with which Trump has a particularly strained relationship. The Spanish Prime Minister was one of the few in Europe not to accept NATO’s demand to spend 5 per cent of GDP on defence; he opposes sanctions against Iran and has refused to grant US aircraft access to Spanish bases. Sánchez has made distancing his government from Washington a defining feature of his administration, and so the tone adopted by the White House on the Ceuta affair comes as no surprise: “Spain and other countries that have embraced this destructive philosophy should change course immediately, or they risk their own demise,” said spokeswoman Anna Kelly yesterday.