The 'Trump List' doesn't lie

Alfred Lela

Beyond basic needs — obtaining a visa, visiting relatives, family reunification, or seeking employment in the United States — the Trump Administration’s decision to place Albania on a so-called “blacklist,” alongside 175 other countries, cuts far deeper than that.

If one moves past ethnic insecurity, resists the temptation to use this fact merely as another arrow against the “Rama government,” and avoids the reflexive claim that “Americans only look after their own interests,” this decision reveals something far more serious: a cold, unfiltered picture of Albania’s real status in the world.

On that list of miserable countries — to use Donald Trump’s own brutal phrase, “the asshole of the world” — Albania comes face to face with itself. With its true global index. With its geopolitical body temperature. With its actual weight in major negotiations. With the essential question: Does Albania have a head that thinks and weighs consequences, or merely a balloon of pathetic self-importance drifting aimlessly through space, eventually collapsing into the black hole of irrelevance?

Much like the “Albania 1” and “Albania 2” satellites, sold as national miracles but later revealed as communication stunts, this list shatters yet another carefully built grand illusion over two decades: the illusion of importance.

This list tells us exactly who we are. The blame can be distributed as one wishes — to the government, to the people, or to the unfortunate opposition, which is blamed both by the ruling power and by parts of society whenever things go wrong. This is an old Albanian reflex, inherited from regimes that for 45 years always found the culprit elsewhere: sometimes King Zog, sometimes “overthrown classes,” sometimes the external enemy — and, not coincidentally, America was often placed at the top of that list.

However, this list undermines something even more significant: the European myth. The myth that “we are in Europe,” that “we are entering the EU,” that accession will happen in 2027 or 2030 — dates that shift according to the political hallucinations of the Prime Minister and his entourage.

One only has to look at the European and Eurasian countries included in this list: Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Moldova, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Russia, and Uzbekistan. Countries with one foot in Europe and the other in Asia. Borderlands. Grey zones. Transit countries. Not Greece. Not Serbia. Not Italy. Not countries with consolidated European standing.

In the Euro-Asian geography of American exclusions, Albania stands among the “quasi-Europeans” — or, more accurately, Europeans without weight.

This is the factual context behind the European fairy tale sold by Edi Rama, aided by increasingly confused EU officials drifting between the United States, China, Russia, and nowhere at all — anchoring that uncertainty precisely in countries like Albania, which have no strategic compass other than Euro-Atlantic integration.

This list exposes not only the falsehood of “good governance,” “European standards,” and the endless technocratic jargon repeated daily on television. More than that, it brings down another long-inflated balloon: the myth of Edi Rama as an “international brand.”

The American decision proves the opposite. Rama and his government have no real negotiating power. They enjoy no genuine respect in Washington. They have no access to the rooms where decisions are made. If they did, Albania would not be on this list, would not be classified as an appendix, a migratory nuisance, a “non-country.”

This is the greatest blow to Albania’s international public standing in the last two decades. Albania is governed by someone who treats foreign relations as a joke, as white sneakers, as poses, as a corruption wheel that needs occasional lubrication.

Twelve years of this behavior have not produced progress. They have produced isolation.

Today, Albania once again finds itself on the list of countries no one needs.
“The asshole of the world,” to paraphrase President Trump.

And as painful as it may be, this is the truth.