You can trace this back to the Guatemala Coup of '54. But I think the double-speak really took off after Bush invaded Panama to get his old friend Noriega. "Banana Republic" stopped being "Latin American country ruled by United Fruit Company gestapo" and started meaning "Latin American country ruled by military dictatorship", with "communism" and "dictatorship" converging to mean the same thing.

With Venezuelans moving in to extract O&G resources from around Guyana and Milei doing clown shit in Argentina, I'm sure you're going to see a new round of "South American Government Doing A Banana Republic" news stories cropping up in the press that OP's guy will gobble up. Haiti's been getting a lot of that treatment recently, too, thanks to the "deteriorating" state of their "democracy".

In either case, there's a strong BlueAnon vibe to the insistence among liberals that Biden is secretly doing great and simply getting shafted by the Evil Media. This feels like it fell directly out of the 90s/00s era Republican playbook. Shouldn't be surprising since it seems like Biden's staffed his PR team with a bunch of Bill Kristol era hacks.