WeeklySA_AdminMIDDLE FINGER: Eccentric US president Donald Trump thinks the world is his personal playground…
With Sy Makaringe
DONALD Trump is back with a vengeance. This time he thinks in his warped mind that he is not only the president of the United States, but also of the world, which he reckons he can manipulate anyway he desires.
In keeping with his “America First” election promise, Trump unilaterally withdrew the US from multilateral initiatives such as the Paris Agreement on Climate Change and institutions like the World Health Organisation immediately he took office in the White House on January 20.
He also froze the funding of international humanitarian aid, bludgeoning thousands of development-related jobs across the globe.
Over and above deciding to impose hefty tariffs on countries such as China, Mexico and Canada, Trump threatened Greenland with seizure and the Gaza Strip with a massive “clean-up” to make way for real estate development.
He plans to achieve this by uprooting and shipping all of Gaza Strip’s 2,2 million long-suffering Palestinian citizens to neighbouring countries such as Egypt and Jordan.
He has basically declared war on the universe. He is wreaking havoc everywhere he goes.
South Africa is also feeling his ire and venom after accusing it, falsely of course, of land confiscations and of “treating certain classes of people (read whites) VERY BADLY”.
Trump was apparently angered by President Cyril Ramaphosa’s signing of the Land Expropriation Amendment Act and the Basic Education Laws Amendment (BELA) Act after receiving complaints from his rightwing friends in AfriForum.
It was rich coming from a man who, on the first day of his second nonconsecutive term as US president, declared America as a country of two genders, instantaneously airbrushing the LGBTQI+ community.
This is the very man who showed thousands of American workers from marginalised and underprivileged groupings – including blacks, Latinos and women – the middle finger when he abolished the transformative DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) programmes with immediate effect.
This is the man who sought to cancel the birthright citizenship for children born to parents who are in the US illegally. A federal judge saw through the madness and put a stop to it.
When former Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi displayed tendencies that many in the West regarded as going against the grain of human sanity, then then US president, Ronald Reagan, infamously labelled him the “Mad Dog of the Middle East”.
Fortunately or unfortunately for Reagan, he did not live long enough to witness the political lunacy of his fellow countryman, one Donald Trump.
If Ronald Reagan were still alive today – he died in 2004 aged 93 – he was probably going to call Donald J Trump the “Mad Dog of the Western World”.
MUSK UNMASKED
DONALD Trump might act all macho, loud and authoritative but he is not in total control of the world’s largest economy.
Instead, the real power lies with Elon Musk, the richest man on the planet to whom Trump handed over the keys to the US federal vaults soon after he took over the reins from Joe Biden on January 20.
The South African-born billionaire, who doled out millions of dollars to boost Trump’s 2024 election campaign against then US vice-president Kamala Harris, has as a result of that astonishing move been controlling government payment systems in the Treasury. This was so until a judge recently put a temporary stop to it.
To demonstrate he is the one who possesses real power, Musk sharply contradicted Trump after the newly elected US president announced an ambitious $500 billion Stargate AI project. Writing on his X platform, the Tesla and SpaceX boss said of the tech billionaire that Trump had named as the investors in the project: “They actually don’t have the money.”
Ouch, that hurt!
Bemused Americans are still struggling to make sense of the madness happening in their beloved country, which saw an unelected civilian, a foreign national for that matter, at highest decision-making level in the government.
South Africans know this phenomenon all too well; it’s called State Capture. Fortunately for us, our state capturers were forced to flee the country before they could lay their grubby hands on the till at the national Treasury.
PARLIAMENT’S PINOCCHIO
HONOURABLE Carl Gerhardus Niehaus, MP, was highly vocal and animated in parliament earlier in the week when legislators grilled Defence and Military Veterans Minister Angie Motshekga and the country’s military chiefs following the tragic deaths of 14 of our brave soldiers in the eastern DRC.
Representing the EFF, the fourth-largest political party in the National Assembly, Niehaus accused the government of sending our troops to their deaths in the eastern DRC to protect the mining interests of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s “family and his white friends” in the region.
Legislators do not make such serious accusations lightly; they often do so after they have found solid proof to back them up.
But then Carl Niehaus is not just like any other parliamentarian; he has a very toxic friendship with the truth.
No wonder none of his fellow MPs seem to take his claims seriously.
After all, who would believe a man who once went to the extent of falsely claiming his mother had died and that he stood to inherit 90% of her estate when the poor old lady was still all, well and kicking?
PARLIAMENT’S POPEYE
IF the EFF has its own Pinocchio in Parliament, former president Jacob Zuma’s uMkhonto we Sizwe party has not done too badly either as it has installed its own Popeye in those hallowed chambers.
“I’m not here to be a Popeye,” singer Papa Penny aka Eric Nkovane proclaimed in November last year as he was about to address the house when fellow parliamentarians mockingly asked him to sing a song for them.
Since then he has been trying to shake off the Parliament’s Popeye label without success. He did not fare any better on SONA day on Thursday night when he arrived at the venue kitted in one an outrageous outfit to add spectator value to the occasion for curious onlookers.
“I am African who owned the minerals, who be shine with the gold. You know the Western they said the African they must wear the skin. I’m not animals; I’m African who owned the minerals. I proud with gold mineral what God gives us. Hi leswi Xikwembu Xi nga hi nyika swona.”
Popeye or parliamentarian? You be the judge.
