A FAMOUS GROUSE

THIS morning’s editorial cartoon in The Times features the figure of Uncle Sam addressing the world’s media. “It was a tough choice,” he says, “‘Madam President’ or ‘Madman President’…”

It’s the latter, sadly. There will now be, unthinkably, an unabashed fascist in the White House. Americans have elected as their next president a man who is, among other things, a convicted felon, an adjudicated rapist, a blatant liar, a raging narcissist, an unrepentant xenophobic and a vengeful and spiteful autocrat rather than a sensible grown-up. 

Throughout the election campaign, Donald Trump’s supporters have responded with, at best, indifference to those who object to his crude vulgarity. Many seem proud of such abhorrent behaviour, and with a degree of smugness too. ___STEADY_PAYWALL___

Mention the rape allegations, the friendship with sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, and the response would be, “Yes, and…?” The riots at the Capitol in January 2021? “Your point being…?” The insults and lies? “Who doesn’t do that stuff…?”

None of this mattered. To insist otherwise, that these were significant character flaws, to say the least, would result in sneers and braying about so-called Trump Derangement Syndrome, a knee-jerk response that says more about the man’s supporters than his critics.

There will, I suspect, be no end to post mortems and analysis pieces on the result, how Kamala Harris and her team failed to connect with the beleaguered white men of middle America and how support for Trump, even in the face of outrageous falsehoods and “alternative facts”, is driven by psychological factors like confirmation bias, cognitive dissonance, social identity, false beliefs and fear. 

Mention will be made of the Dunning-Kruger effect, that those with the least knowledge or ability in a particular area, overestimate their understanding. There will be much discussion on echo chambers, and how social media platforms and biased news outlets create environments where alternative viewpoints are minimised and false narratives are reinforced rather than challenged.

The US election caps a year in which the world went to the polls. More than 70 countries, representing half the world’s population, held elections in 2024. But, far from being a triumph, the year has been a lousy one for democracy, considering the fraud and vote-rigging that took place in India, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Georgia, Mozambique and elsewhere.

This is not to suggest the US election wasn’t free and fair. At the time of writing, the only suggestion of “cheating” had come from the Trump camp. In the run-up to Tuesday, Trump ramped up the rhetoric about the “integrity of the electoral process”, echoing the baseless fraud claims of 2020.

That is now all by the by, and Trump enters the White House in January. His supporters may believe that he will make American great again, but the rest of the world anticipate the coming months with some dread.

The New York Times published a hard-hitting editorial last month, headlined simply “Believe him.” There was a certain irony to this, given that the American media had meticulously chronicled the tens of thousands of lies and falsehoods uttered by Trump in his first presidency. The Washington Post, for example, put this figure at 30 573 “false and misleading claims” in the four years to 24 January this year.

The point, though, that the NYT was making was simply this: we should believe Trump when he says he will use the US justice department to punish those he doesn’t like and those he regards as political enemies; believe him when he says he will round up and deport millions of immigrants; believe his threats to deploy the military against American citizens; believe him when he says he will allow vigilante violence to deal with crime; believe his threats to punish Democrat states by withholding disaster relief; and believe his promises to use “ideological tests” to decide which American schools get federal funding.

That’s the domestic agenda. The rest of us, however, should know that he’s not fooling when he says he will order military attacks on civilian targets in foreign countries if the US is attacked. 

More alarmingly, we should believe him when he says he is going to abandon US allies. This is bad news for NATO. In 2018, as president, Trump instructed aides to prepare the US’s withdrawal from the defence pact. He was dissuaded from doing so, partly by promises from European countries to increase military spending. This has happened. But Trump remains dismissive of Nato and has shown no appreciation of or interest in its strategic importance.

Last year, Congress passed a law prohibiting the president from withdrawing the US from NATO without lawmakers’ approval. But there are fears Trump could still undermine the alliance without a formal withdrawal by simply reducing the number of troops dedicated to NATO, an approach that is of deep concern, to say the least, to the Balkan states. In Kyiv, meanwhile, there will be great uncertainty about Ukraine’s future and Trump’s “peace plans”. In the Kremlin, though, much to celebrate.

There are fears, too, in the UK, even among Conservative Party grandees. William Hague, former Tory leader and by no means a lefty bedwetter or whatever it is the knuckledraggers are calling rational people these days, has warned that Trump is the leader of a “dark cult that threatens freedom everywhere”,

Writing in The Times on Monday, Hague warned against comparisons with Republican presidents like Ronald Reagan:

“We knew Reagan wasn’t following the details, but we also knew he was generous to opponents and steadfast for freedom. In words also applied to Franklin D Roosevelt, he was a 'second-class intellect with a first-class temperament’. That would never be a description of Trump. He is a serious danger. If Reagan stood for ‘morning in America’, Trump is the approach of midnight. Whatever our past affiliations, we should all be Democrats.”

That, of course, was ahead of the elections. But no matter. The sentiment remains.

On the plus side, a golden, or rather orange era lies ahead for satirists everywhere; four more years in which the copy literally writes itself.

Shebeen news

Can the leader of one political party take exception to being booted out of another political party — and yet want to remain a member of both parties? Can there be such an implausible situation? 

The answer, it would seem, is indeed yes, for nothing is beyond the realms of possibility where Jacob Zuma is concerned, and he remains determined to contest his expulsion from the ANC, which was deemed necessary following his emergence as the figurehead and leader of the MK Party.

Convict Number One, meanwhile, happily continues to dwell in a weird world of his own. He emerged from his fantasy bubble at the weekend to claim that “Western countries” had weakened the ANC to the extent that it had to enter into a coalition with opposition parties in order to remain in power.

“They pushed the government that we should negotiate,” Zuma told an audience at the launch of the Sisulu Foundation for Social Justice on Robben Island. “[They said] ‘You have to agree that you must negotiate. We as the Western countries will not support you if you continue fighting, because if you are defeated, the communists will come in and take over this country. Our strategic point would have been gone.’”

He would not name these “Western countries” but there had been “secret meetings”, he said, in which they had had warned that “our job [as the West] would be to weaken the ANC because it is too big.

“We are separating ourselves every day, I don’t know how many political parties we have, what will that help us with? The more political parties we have, the more the majority reduces from us,” he added.

Details of other secret meetings are meanwhile contained in former ANC treasurer-general Mathews Phosa’s tell-all, Witness to Power: A Political Memoir (Penguin). 

Judging by reports, Witness to Corruption may have been a better title, for Phosa recounts buttonholing Rajesh Gupta in 2010 and confronting him about the family’s lack of support for the ruling party. 

“But we have already made a contribution,” Gupta replied. “We gave Baba R20-million.”

“I was shocked,” Phosa writes, “and told him I was unaware of the donation.” He adds that he had no idea whether Gupta was telling the truth about this donation to Zuma “but it made me extremely uneasy”.

Such disquiet did little, however, to affect the ruling party’s dealings with the Guptas or, indeed, Zuma. Instead there came much furtive activity to protect the relationship.

Phosa writes that he first met with the Gupta brothers — Ajay, Atul and Rajesh (also known as Tony) — at their luxury Saxonwold compound in 2008, shortly after the Polokwane conference where Zuma replaced Thabo Mbeki as ANC leader. It was at this first meeting that the ANC’s financial problems were raised, and Phosa asked the brothers to draw up a list of Indian companies that could donate money to the party.

“The Guptas boasted that they were acting for Amil Ambani of the Reliance Group, a powerful conglomerate with reach across a wide range of industries.” The bothers indicated that Reliance wanted to invest in the mobile company MTN — provided that MTN’s primary listing moved to India. “I replied that our laws governing stock-exchange listings would not allow that.”

There was further alarm, Phosa writes, when the Guptas then offered to fly Zuma to any country the ANC identified as a potential source of income, including India:

“We were in the midst of a complex and politically sensitive process trying to extricate Zuma from the Schabir Shaik scandal and had a duty to protect him from any similar embarrassment. If it emerged that we were being flown around the world for free, it would only add to the ANC’s and Zuma’s sorrows. I firmly told them as much.”

The cynical among us may wonder how firm exactly was this firm response. Certain spongy life forms spring to mind. But moving on. Later in the meeting, Phosa was “surprised” by a business proposal from the Guptas.

“They needed a local partner for one of their companies, Sahara Computers. I said I would look into it. After some research, my staff and I came to the conclusion that Sahara was nothing more than a shelf company … I never replied to the offer and it was never repeated.”

Some weeks later, Phosa and Rajesh Gupta flew to Dubai where they jointly opened an ANC bank account. Afterwards, the two repaired to a restaurant near Phosa’s hotel.

“To my great discomfort,” Phosa writes, “[Gupta] launched into excessive flattery, indicating that, in their view, I was the natural future successor to Zuma and that he and his brothers had only the highest respect for me. He said they knew that Zuma also deeply respected me. I did not react to his unfortunate adulation, was as I was where this was all leading.”

To wit, an arrangement about how the money in the new account should be managed: a third to the ANC, a third to Zuma, and a third to the Guptas.

“I was infuriated,” Phosa writes, “but tried my best to remain calm. I refused point-blank to agree to his proposal, which, I told him, could potentially cause substantial harm to Zuma, the ANC, and others. My position made clear, I bid him goodbye and left, leaving him at the restaurant … To this day, I do not know whether any money accrued in that account, and, if it did, how it was disbursed.”

All this was, as they say in the classics, heavy shit. And yet Phosa claims he was reluctant to inform other members of the ANC’s leadership of details of his interaction with the Guptas. “I dismissed it all as a load of rubbish and a waste of time. I did not realise, at that stage, the extent to which they had already infiltrated the ANC, its leadership and the institutions of government.”

Hmmm. It does seem terribly unconvincing. Film buffs will recall the line by Captain Renault, the police chief played by Claude Rains in Casablanca, as gendarmes raid the casino in Rick’s Cafe: “I’m shocked! Shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!” For those who haven’t seen the movie, the words are uttered just as a croupier surreptitiously slips Renault his winnings. 

Spiritual matters

Wall-to-wall wailing and gnashing of teeth in the UK’s conservative press over chancellor Rachel Reeves’ budget last week, which has been slammed by business leaders and the like as disastrous, spiteful and one that will hamper growth by gouging the wealthy in a £40-billion tax grab. 

Much relief then, among the regulars at the Slaughtered Lamb (“Finest Ales & Pies”), at the Daily Star’s take on the news of the day. “Sod the budget,” the tabloid trumpeted on its front page, “this is the biggest and most important story today: Ghosts are dying out!”

Yes, it was Halloween, mourned by traditionalists as a Christian celebration to commemorate the memory of saints and martyrs that has morphed into a celebration of pop culture horror associated with the supernatural and the macabre.

But this too could pass. It seems that ghosts have a limited lifespan — “just like humans” — and vanish after a hundred years or so. This is according to research by one Brian Sterling-Vete, PhD, who heads up Paranormal Rescue, the world’s first international professional emergency service dedicated to saving ghosts. (And there really is such a n organisation; you can check its website here.) He was quoted by the Daily Star as saying:

“When all the data was considered, it was quite a shock to think that many of our once-famous ghosts could be literally dying. It was apparent that famous ghosts in once-notably haunted locations were being seen increasingly less frequently, and some had not been seen in many years.”

Sterling-Vete has a theory, something to do with the second law of thermodynamics which holds that energy tends to disperse and degrade over time. Ghosts are apparently subject to this law. 

But some do hang around. The tabloid suggests that the ghost of Winston Churchill has yet to die his “second death” and is currently haunting the women’s toilets of the Queen Mary, the historic luxury liner that is now a floating museum in Long Beach, California. 

Such behaviour is in keeping with the distressing trend towards mixed use facilities. No word as yet, however, from the afterlife concerning gender realignment. The wartime leader’s pronouns remain doggedly heteronormative.