What I Saw on Morocco’s Donald J. Trump Highway

Por Memphis Barker — POLITICO – TOP Stories

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 border police.

Despite the Moroccan flags and gendarmes, much of this highway is not in what the rest of the world recognizes as part of Morocco. It’s in Western Sahara, what Morocco calls the “Southern Territories,” a stretch of desert about the size of the UK that sits south of Morocco on the map, and is considered by the U.N. to be disputed territory. An insurgency by indigenous Sahrawi has simmered for decades, but a promised U.N.-backed referendum was never held.

In 2015, King Mohammed announced his plan to build a motorway longer than any other in the country at that time. The route would “enhance the influence of Sahara as an economic hub” and “link Morocco with its African roots,” he said. But it would also serve a grander purpose. Under his “Development Plan for the Southern Territories”, the all-powerful monarch outlined, in effect, a plan to take control of Western Sahara. Running for hundreds of miles through officially ownerless land, the road would form the linchpin of the project. Yet ports would also be built, welfare schemes launched and “true Sahrawi patriots” brought into the fold of Moroccan life, the King promised.

Beneath the U.N.-friendly language lay a more imperial dream. Ever since, in the 1950s, France and Spain gave up their Moroccan protectorates, the ruling Alaouite dynasty of which King Mohammed is the 23rd monarch has set its sights on one goal above all else: expanding the country’s borders into Western Sahara. The region boasts natural resources, from phosphate to fish. Yet the campaign springs most from a sense that the retreating European colonizers drew Morocco’s borders arbitrarily and far too tightly for an empire that once stretched south (through Mali, Mauritania and Senegal) and east (through parts of modern Algeria).

“I have decided to muster all the means available… to complete the Kingdom’s territorial integrity,” said King Mohammed in his 2015 speech to mark the 40th anniversary of the Green March, when 350,000 people crossed into Western Sahara and forced Spain — which kept control of the desert long after leaving the prosperous north — to hasten its withdrawal there, too. Through this vast spending, around $8 billion in total, he hoped to win over the primary obstacle that still stands in the way of Morocco’s expansion: the unwillingness of the native Sahrawi people to bend the knee to a nation, and a king, they do not recognize.

On the drive south, tents began to line the beach. These were not for refugees, at least not from the war. With the temperature rising to 113 degrees Fahrenheit inland, many Sahrawis choose to set up camp for the summer months along the foggy Atlantic coast. They bring cars, fishing rods and elaborate tea-sets. The fitful war that Morocco has waged against the Polisario Front, the armed independence movement deemed to represent the Sahrawi people by the U.N., occurs mostly out of sight — behind a 10-foot-high sand berm that runs the length of the desert. Since the official purpose of our entry to Morocco was tourism, we drove past the encampments and made no effort to see the berm, constructed in the 1980s and still guarded by 100,000 Moroccan soldiers and one of the densest minefields in the world.

In his letter to Trump confirming the motorway’s new name, King Mohammed expressed the utmost gratitude. The president’s decision in 2020 to recognize Morocco’s sovereignty over Western Sahara would be “forever etched in the memory of Moroccans,” he wrote. In exchange, the King had normalized relations with Israel under the Abraham Accords — a controversial gambit in a Sunni Muslim country whose population, while held in check by powerful security forces, firmly backs the Palestinian cause. Yet the gamble has since paid off many times over.

Before Trump’s intervention, the question of Western Sahara’s ultimate owner had languished under the stewardship of the U.N., which had tried — but summarily failed — to secure the terms for a referendum after brokering a ceasefire in 1991. After Trump’s swipe of the pen, the dominoes started to fall in Morocco’s direction. France, Spain, the UK and EU now back the King’s plan to offer “autonomy” to Western Sahara under his rule. Most African and Arab states had already given their approval. By naming the road after Trump, the King effectively reminded the remaining hold-outs — specifically, the Polisario Front and its backers in Algeria — of the cement applied by the White House to Morocco’s claim of sovereignty.

“I hope to travel the length of this great highway, someday, hopefully soon,” the president wrote back on Truth Social, injecting enough caveats to ensure no one would take him too seriously.

Morocco has not let unaccompanied foreign journalists into Western Sahara for years. In May 2025, two Italian correspondents posing as tourists were arrested at the entry to Laayoune, the administrative capital and richest city in the territory, then driven north and deported. A Spanish reporter met a similar fate weeks before. But authorities in the Moroccan capital of Rabat have recently begun to invite Western politicians on tours of the city; Ryanair now advertises “Moroccan adventures” in Dakhla, the narrow peninsula at the southernmost end of the Trump highway that markets itself to kite-surfers. Much to Sahrawi dismay, Christopher Nolan filmed parts of The Odyssey on its beaches. We packed a surfboard into our van and headed south, planning to complete Trump’s road-trip ourselves.

Eight checkpoints passed without trouble. Shortly before the ninth, at the entry to Laayoune, my photographer received a request to connect on LinkedIn from an unexpected source: a member of the Direction Générale de la Sûreté Nationale (DGSN), the Moroccan police force responsible for border security and surveillance. He ignored it. Nevertheless, the gendarme who inspected our passports did not ask for our professions — something we had no intention to hide. After a five-minute wait, we dropped our tense grins as the guard ushered us onwards, past a barracks, military hospital and courthouse, and into the city.

“This whole city is very beautiful, it’s the best in Western Sahara,” said Walid, a tour guide we approached the next morning as he showed a group of well-heeled Moroccan visitors around a splendid, but otherwise empty, marble square marking the culmination of the Green March. “Tourism really began two or three years ago,” he said. “People want to hear the story of how Hassan II (King Mohammed’s father) drove out the Spanish colonizers.” It would not have been wise, within the earshot of nearby police, to raise the grievances of the local Sahrawi population, who view Morocco itself as a colonizing force and risk imprisonment for engaging with the Western media.

Newcomers to the city do have plenty to admire: Gardens brim with perfectly trimmed trees, gurgling fountains and unscuffed gym equipment. Builders labor on hundreds of new houses. The Arab and African state diplomats employed in new Laayoune consulates can eat in plush, air-conditioned restaurants with Western-sounding names: Pizzeria Favorita, La Giardineria, Amba Coffee (“the taste of the desert”). Litter disappears swiftly from the streets. Compared with overflowing rubbish bins in parts of Morocco proper, the sum effect is startling, as if you have skipped into a computer simulation or U.N. development blueprint.

For decades, the federal government in Rabat has enticed Moroccans south with lower taxes, higher pay, subsidized food and fuel and, overall, the promise of a higher quality of life. By now, a majority of the territory’s roughly 600,000-strong population are thought to hail from the north — enough, were the franchise in any referendum to be widened to include post-1974 arrivals, as Rabat wishes, to probably swing the vote in its favor.

But an air of dystopia lingers, perhaps deliberately so. To celebrate the anniversary of King Mohammed’s accession, on July 30, his face beams out from billboards mounted on steel poles throughout the city, both back and front. You can see 17 copies of the same photograph — where he sits on a golden throne against a tiled background, hands folded, a light smile on the edge of his lips — from a single roundabout. When the wind picks up, all that can be heard is the frantic flapping of the huge Moroccan flags that line the streets. People rarely seem to tarry in public: benches sit empty, squares deserted and children do not clamber on the playground equipment that gleams behind the high terracotta walls of the Jardins des Enfants.

All this investment delivers returns, the government says. Morocco’s “southern territories” — the 80% of Western Sahara it now controls — make up a small proportion of the total economy, at around 4% of national GDP. But that figure is rising. Laayoune region grew the fastest in the country in 2024, up 7.4%, according to official figures. It has the lowest poverty rate in Morocco. The GDP per capita stands at 74,000 dirhams ($7,900), more than two-and-a-half times that of the region including Marrakech, where tourists land en masse each year. Critics point out that more than a third of that figure goes to the security forces. And although Sahrawis who drop their politics are widely said to face no discrimination on the job market, many still struggle for work. Unemployment in the region has climbed to 22%, as of 2024 — far above the 13% nationwide.

“It’s a sham,” said a local Sahrawi man, when asked about a concrete shell resembling an upturned ship that sits at one end of Place Oum Saad, a long public square adorned with wooden, fairytale-style bridges and a concrete skate bowl. “They build these things, but none of the money comes to us — none of the phosphate, none of the fish, none of the tomatoes.” Instead, he claimed, the resources went to “thieves” up north and their bank accounts in Europe. Work began on the impressive edifice years ago; sand-filled winds had long since eaten away at architectural renderings laid out around the square. He declined to provide his name saying, “I’m scared to speak,” crossing his wrists in imaginary handcuffs. So are Moroccans from the north who wonder, privately, if all the spending on the southern territories might have contributed to the desperation elsewhere in the country that drove so many young people to swim across the Ceuta border.

Practically, the Sahrawi independence movement is dying. In 2010, Rabat crushed the last major challenge to its authority, a 20,000-strong protest camp formed on the outskirts of Laayoune. Its student leaders languish in prison. All that remains of the public protest movement inside the city are hastily painted-over scrawls of graffiti — “free the prisoners” — and brief, female-led gatherings like the whoops that followed Morocco’s exit from the World Cup in July. Militarily, the Polisario Front also withers ever further away. It has no counter to Morocco’s drones, which easily pick off the militants who once sped across the dunes in Land Cruisers, rocket-launchers at the ready. Algeria, the source of such weaponry, appears tired of the conflict and could be convinced to accept some form of King Mohammed’s autonomy plan.

Enter Donald Trump. On July 28, the U.S. ambassador to Morocco, Richard Duke Buchan III, became one of the first top-level American officials to set foot in Laayoune. “From Sahraoui Tagines to American double cheeseburgers, Laayoune has it all,” Buchan wrote on X, alongside a picture outside the gates of the city’s large and spotless McDonald’s. “Moroccan Sahara, I’m lovin’ it,” he signed off, using the fast-food chain’s advertising slogan to signal Washington’s approval of the formal takeover of Western Sahara. When we stepped inside the McDonald’s, a house remix of “ABC” by the Jackson 5 was playing on the stereo. A waitress, smiling at the memory of the diplomat’s visit, brought up an image of the ambassador on her phone. During his trip, Buchan announced plans for U.S. investment in an ammonia plant. In time, Rabat hopes to gain much more than that — perhaps a full consulate in Laayoune, but most importantly, continued diplomatic engagement to finally end the tug of war over Western Sahara’s disputed status.

The annexation project absorbs “80 or 90% of the attention of every government department,” says Riccardo Fabiani, North Africa director at the International Crisis Group think tank. American pressure will determine the next steps. Washington holds the pen for the U.N. file on Western Sahara and when, on Oct. 31, the mission’s mandate comes up for renewal, it could wind up the 35-year peacekeeping effort entirely. Trump’s emissary, Massad Boulos, is leading rare direct negotiations between Algeria, Morocco and the Polisario Front. He could lean harder on Rabat’s opponents to accept the King’s autonomy plan, perhaps threatening to designate the Front as a terrorist entity — and so remove it from the dealmaking process entirely. He could even back Morocco calling a vote to settle Western Sahara’s status in the U.N. General Assembly, something years of diplomatic outreach ensure it would likely win. (Only last month, Colombia declared it too endorses full Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara.)

It is with this relationship in mind that the migratory surge into Ceuta should be viewed, Fabiani argues. In 2021, Rabat funneled 8,000 migrants across the border into Ceuta to protest Spain’s provision of medical care to Brahim Ghali, the 76-year-old leader of the Polisario Front. The recent, far larger surge appears to have originated spontaneously. Yet Morocco’s decision not to stand in the migrants’ way suggests a desire to “please” the White House, which views Spain’s Socialist prime minister Pedro Sánchez as the embodiment of all that is wrong with Europe — anti-Israel, pro-migration and resolutely penny-pinching when it comes to defense. Indeed, Washington has been accused of encouraging just such an incident in the months prior. A think tank close to the White House had urged Moroccans to seize Ceuta. An influential congressional committee cast doubt on Spain’s control of the enclave. “I think Morocco has mastered the art of keeping this very erratic administration committed to its key goal, which is the autonomy plan for Western Sahara,” Fabiani says.

Even if the King gets his way, Bachri Ben Taleb will struggle on. “I will not give up,” said the president of the Sahrawi Association of Victims of Grave Violations of Human Rights Committed by the Moroccan State, whose headquarters the Moroccan authorities forced to close in 2022. “The Sahrawi people’s right to independence cannot be taken away through political agreements, changes in international alliances or the passage of time,” he said in a phone interview. “If you look beyond the image of buildings, roads and commercial projects, you will find a completely different reality,” added Taleb, who asked that his name be published despite the surveillance, attacks and imprisonment he has endured over a lifetime of activism. “I believe that speaking openly is important, particularly when the people whose rights we defend are themselves denied the opportunity.”

The next day, we had just driven back onto the Trump highway when we saw something extraordinary out of the window. Outside Laayoune, the pillars of a gigantic new bridge stand like concrete leviathans in a sand-strewn valley. My photographer took out his camera for the first time; the shot was too good to miss. (Local media says the bridge will cost $150 million and ease congestion in Laayoune — something of which we saw little evidence.) As the photographer turned around, he spotted a man in an unmarked car photographing him from behind the rolled-up window. Then we noticed another car following at close quarters. It stopped wherever we stopped and hid, at one point, behind one of the mammoth sand dunes that diggers were fruitlessly trying to remove from the road.

In an effort to ease the surveillance, we drove down to the nearby beach at Foum El Oued, where I tried, and failed, to surf, under the watch of Moroccan secret police. It felt like the moment to cut the trip short.

All the way back up the Donald J. Trump highway, a blue car trailed in our wake — looping back around, after a sharp turn, to follow us down a narrow gravel pathway. In the dark, its headlights glinted in the rear-view mirror.

Fonte: POLITICO – TOP Stories