Disgraced political consultant Dick Morris and Juan Rodríguez, the Cuban-American lawyer nominated by President Trump as U.S. ambassador to Guatemala only to withdraw before confirmation after widespread accusations of impropriety, have been circulating in Guatemala claiming they can deliver Donald Trump’s endorsement to any presidential hopeful who adopts their preferred candidate for vice president.
The pitch is abjectly false. No such guarantee exists from the White House or the State Department. Morris and Rodríguez are running a classic influence-peddling grift by exaggerating their proximity to President Trump in order to extract fees and insert themselves into Guatemala’s 2027 electoral field.
WHO IS JUAN RODRIGUEZ?
Rodríguez was nominated by Trump as Ambassador to Guatemala in March 2026. He appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 28, outlining an America First agenda focused on irregular migration, security cooperation, and countering Chinese influence. On June 30 he withdrew his nomination, citing personal and family reasons in a later statement.
The timing followed questions about his extensive prior business relationships in the country. As managing partner of the Coral Gables firm Carey Rodríguez, he has decades of experience in international shareholder disputes and asset recovery involving Guatemalan entities. Court records and reporting show he served as a director of Xela Enterprises Ltd. between 2012 and 2016, during a period when the company faced allegations of defrauding shareholders, and represented interests linked to the Gutiérrez group in long-running litigation against the Bosch-Gutiérrez side of Corporación Multi Inversiones.
Those entanglements created obvious potential conflicts for a prospective U.S. ambassador. While Rodríguez framed his withdrawal as personal, the combination of deep commercial ties and the subsequent freelancing with Morris has fueled accusations that personal interests and the prospect of private gain outweighed official service.
WHO IS DICK MORRIS?
Morris brings a longer and more notorious record. A Democratic operative who advised Bill Clinton from the late 1970s, he became the president’s chief strategist for the 1996 re-election campaign after the Republican midterm landslide. He resigned on the final night of the Democratic National Convention after tabloid revelations of a year-long affair with a $200-an-hour prostitute, Sherry Rowlands. She described him allowing her to listen in on telephone calls with Clinton, sharing advance drafts of speeches, and referring to the president as “Monster” and the First Lady as “Twister.” The episode also included reports of an out-of-wedlock child from an earlier relationship.
Morris has long been viewed as a political mercenary. He once explained his willingness to work for Republicans by noting that they “have more money.” After the scandal he reinvented himself as a commentator, later writing books such as Armageddon: How Trump Can Beat Hillary that positioned him as a strategic architect of Republican victories. He has claimed that secret memos and his counsel were decisive in Trump’s 2016 nomination and election—an assertion contradicted by the public record of the campaign, in which Morris played no central operational role. He has similarly exaggerated his father’s connection to Trump, describing the elder Morris, a real estate lawyer, as “Trump’s real estate lawyer” when the actual involvement was limited to a single closing for a seller in a transaction involving Trump.
The pair’s Guatemala activity follows a pattern Morris has pursued elsewhere in Latin America: trading on the perception of proximity to Trump to open doors with donors and candidates. Local reporting and political chatter describe the two men approaching figures who might appeal to nationalist and pro-U.S. constituencies, offering the prospect of Trump’s blessing in exchange for placing a Morris-Rodríguez preferred running mate on the ticket. Recipients have been told the endorsement is effectively locked in but nothing could be further from the truth.
THE GUATEMALAN POLITICAL LANDSCAPE AND THE DONROE DOCTRINE
Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the State Department have emphasized support for free and fair elections in Guatemala and a strong pro-nationalist, pro-U.S. outcome, but they have not authorized or endorsed any specific candidate through intermediaries of this type. Official U.S. interest centers on transparent processes, reduced Chinese influence, cooperation on migration and security, and a government aligned with American priorities—not on private brokers selling access.
The 2027 field already contains several contenders with clear profiles. Zury Ríos, daughter of former de facto president Efraín Ríos Montt, has served multiple terms in Congress and run for president in 2015, 2019, and 2023. She retains sentimental support among older industrialists and segments of the military and conservative base associated with her father’s era, yet repeated campaigns have shown limited ability to expand into urban and younger voters.
Carlos Pineda, a businessman who surged in 2023 polls, was removed from that year’s ballot by the Constitutional Court on technical grounds related to party nomination procedures—failure to collect required delegate signatures and file financial reports. Separately, U.S. authorities canceled his visitor visa in 2023, citing reasonable grounds to believe he had been involved in drug trafficking under the Immigration and Nationality Act. Pineda has repeatedly denied the allegation, attributing the action to political smears or an earlier overstay. Subsequent reviews have not produced public evidence of corruption charges against him, and political speculation in the region has periodically suggested the visa question could be revisited.
On the left, former First Lady Sandra Torres of the Unidad Nacional de la Esperanza (UNE) remains the most prominent figure. As First Lady under Álvaro Colom she directed large social programs, including the conditional cash-transfer initiative Mi Familia Progresa, food assistance, and school-related subsidies. She has reached the presidential runoff in three consecutive cycles (2015, 2019, 2023), losing each time. Torres has faced campaign-finance investigations, including a 2019 arrest on charges of unregistered financing; the cases were later resolved without a lasting conviction. While UNE originated in social-democratic traditions and Torres has advocated expanded social spending and progressive tax measures, she has shifted rhetoric toward the center in later campaigns. She is not an extreme leftist in the mold of regional hard-left figures, but her record centers on state-led poverty-reduction programs and clientelist distribution that critics associate with traditional left-of-center governance.
The Morris-Rodríguez scheme sits outside this landscape. By promising a Trump endorsement that does not exist and conditioning it on acceptance of their own vice-presidential preference, the two men are inserting private commercial and political interests into a contest that U.S. officials have publicly framed as requiring integrity and alignment with American strategic goals. Rodríguez’s unfinished ambassadorship and documented business history in Guatemala, combined with Morris’s history of selling exaggerated access, give the operation the appearance of a coordinated effort to monetize residual Trump-era branding.
Guatemalan donors and candidates approached with such offers are being sold an illusion. The actual U.S. position, as articulated through the State Department under Rubio, prioritizes a clean electoral process and a government prepared to cooperate on migration, security, and countering external influence—not the preferred ticket of two hasbeens with long records of impropriety.
