LAAYOUNE, Western Sahara — Two Moroccan gendarmes idle by the roundabout. One rests against a white van while the other waves through, or stops, the cars that pull to a halt in front of them. Those allowed to pass — and, eventually, all are — skirt a traffic island where a trio of Moroccan flags flutter in the wind and then, if they take the exit towards the city of Guelmim, embark upon the first stretch of the Donald J. Trump Highway, a 655-mile road renamed in honor of the U.S. president as a “personal expression” of King Mohammed VI’s “high regard.” No plaque yet bears Trump’s name, no triumphal arch covers the divided highway, nor have the Stars and Stripes been planted amid the scree and plastic bottles that line the roadside. The signs on the first 300 miles of the highway allude to the more prosaic dangers of driving further and further into the desert: beware camels, sand on the road or tiredness. When those sands still form stable, tree-dotted dunes on either side of the pristine tarmac, the novice driver can be tempted to regard the instructions as merely a local curiosity. But as you head on, wispy yellow fingers start to play at your wheels; then come currents that yank on the steering wheel; and finally, ferocious blasts of sand roar against the windows, filling the car with a sound like radio static and reshaping the land ahead in front of your eyes. After that, the real problems start.“Oh yes, I read about it on the news,” said the manager of a truck-stop cafe when asked if he had heard about the renaming of the highway, still known on Google Maps as National Route 1 or the Tiznit-Dakhla Expressway. “It’s politics,” grumbled a man named Ibrahim, further down the road, as he cranked out two coffees from a Brasileiro machine stacked into the back of his van. That puts it mildly. Of all the hotels, entertainment venues and crypto-currencies that bear the name of Donald J. Trump, none comes close to this road in terms of its geopolitical significance. Travel along and you arrive at one plausible explanation for why, at the end of July, tens of thousands of Moroccans plunged into the ocean in wetsuits or on small boats to storm into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta — unaccosted, for the most part, by Morocco’s… [TheTopNews] Read More.
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