Trump relies on Fox News for all his security and foreign policy briefings and, since they are an integral part of his echosphere, he’s actually listening to his narcissistic self.  It’s a symbiotic relationship – Trump wouldn’t survive without Fox News and vice versa.  They are embedded deeper up Trump’s bum than a proctologist is prepared to venture.  Their morning conservative news and talk program, Fox and Friends, serves up such a daily diet of sludge that it should be renamed Fox and Enemas.

In their latest sycophantic move, their streaming service, Fox Nation, has granted Melania Trump the laughable award of Patriot of the Year – 2025, this for a woman who, in Trump’s first term, wore a green jacket emblazoned with “I REALLY DON’T CARE, DO U?”  during a visit to child detention camps.  This was not a jacket by some avant-garde  designer, but a $39 common or garden jacket on which she had daubed the letters using what looked like the white liquid that we applied with a sponge to our canvas Slazenger tennis shoes in the days before Nike.

(It was also written in all-caps, something which Donald has picked up on with his ‘Truth’ Social posts.)

She was MIA for most of Trump’s first term and just about completely absent during his campaign for re-election. In his second term so far, she attended his inauguration, the Pope’s funeral and a state visit to Britain and that’s about it. She has not made any stirring patriotic speeches, rallying Americans. On the contrary, every time she appears in public it’s under duress and she looks like she’s passing a large kidney stone or thinking about Donald trying to get his leg over the previous night.

On learning about this cringeworthy sycophantic award, SUMAC could not resist mocking the picture they posted by replacing an uncharacteristically smiling Melania with her image from Donald’s inauguration. Her choice of look for the occasion was unfathomable. She looked like she was auditioning for a female Darth Varder, the Grim Reaper or the Plague Doctor. Whatever! Her message to the American People (and Donald) is clear – don’t f%$k with me – a non-verbal version of her previous “I really don’t care” statement.

Trump and his shenanigans dominate the news cycles to such an extent that it’s difficult not to get sucked into their gravitational pull and write yet another piece concerning the free world’s most unlikeable man. With this in mind, scratching through basically finished but old spiked pieces on my computer yielded this tawdry but amusing sidebar to the tawdry Trump world.

Take a look at my girlfriend, she’s the only one I got.
Not much of a girlfriend, I never seem to get a lot. … Breakfast in America by Supertramp.

That long running banal saga, KUWTK 1 , like all good American shows, spun off a lot of lucrative franchises and ventures. Having got rid of her darker half, the unstable (Khan)Ye (god help us), Kim is carving out a new career with her SKIMS range of elastic body stockings which she self-promotes. Her numerous narcissistic selfies in her SKIMS show a perfect hourglass figure without all the bumps and baggy bits that go with it courtesy of the elastic sausage casing.

Not wanting to be caught wanting, Kourtney, a lesser Kardashian light, must have felt even more out of the limelight now that KUWTK has run its course. To boost her profile and her ego, she gushed on TV how sex fasting made it sooo much better. Given that she’s been with her spiky boyfriend, Travis Barker for just over a year 2 , they should still be all over each other like rabbits – looking at ways to tone it down rather than to spice it up. But then, looking at the way Travis has accessorised his skin, he must have plenty of inadequacy issues particularly when his scrawny white body comes up against the tawny voluptuousness of a Kardashian. Keeping it up with a Kardashian must then be an issue …. or not an issue as the case may be. Perhaps he needs the downtime to build up pressure to improve his uptime.

Why is it that famous people want to share their intimate details with whole world like some open-air therapy class? This pathetic narcissistic behaviour is not limited to the A-list celebs. We even have Melinda Gates, probably the richest woman in dowdy shoes apart from the late Queen, wanting to share her innermost feelings with the world who inhabit an existence diametrically opposite to the one she has inhabited for 27 years. It is like some crazy version of an AA meeting. “Hi, I’m Melinda Gates and my partner jilted me. I’ve been single for 6 months and 4 days. Perhaps I can give you some Windows into my situation. I was just DOSsing one day when Bill decided to stick his software – that’s what he’s got, ha ha – into a sleek new machine with great specs to download himself. He never updated me on his status until he caught a virus. He didn’t want to contact his competition, Dr Google, and he only got verse when he tried Dr Suess. Since then, I’ve been on a sex fast. It’s cleared my skin, I’m regular and I feel rich now that I’m divorced.”

Maybe all she hankers for is stardom after years as a grey little woman in the grey shadow of a grey geek. Perhaps she should release a sex tape like Kourtney did in 2003 and so many other celebs have done to perk their fans up. But, she sure as hell doesn’t need to advertise as there must be plenty of young bucks out there without much cache who would love to see if their modern hardware can handle her old clunky software with a bit of plug and play.

1 KUWTK – Keeping Up With The Kardashians, an American unreality show. Puke
2 Kourtney Sex fast – interview early March 2022

While researching this piece, I found that, like Kim, Kourtney too has a carefully curated lifestyle and wellness brand marketed via her esoterically named estore called Poosh – I kid you not. So, any South African disappointed at buying her overpriced rubbish would obviously explete, “Kourtney se Poosh!”

To paraphrase the Bard, “Cry hoax and let slip the dogs of Infowars (and Fox, all the Cabinet toadies and more).”  Normally Trump uses the word hoax as an offensive weapon to put the Democrats on the back foot.  In the Epstein files case, he’s using it as a deflection, in other words, as an offensive defence.  But let’s go back a bit to put a bit of meat into the muddled stew that constitutes Trump’s life.

Having stroked his ego with the successful realIty TV series, The Apprentice, Trump decided to create the biggliest ever reality TV show based on the US Presidency.  Having flirted with a variety of political parties, he eventually settled on the Republican Party to contest the 2016 election.  He saw there was a bunch of disgruntled conservatives who had a variety of gripes and completely distrusted the Federal government.  They hated the rich financiers who they reckoned controlled everything, they hated the weak, commie leftist liberals who embraced LGBTQIA, Black and women’s rights and were soft on crime.  At the same time, they bought into every conspiracy theory, no matter how wacky.  With his fact free and loose freewheeling style, this was something he could work with.  He created the MAGA slogan which actually became a movement itself. What was to become the (MAGA) Base, comprised rabid right-wing podcasters, conspiracy nut jobs, Qanon, The Proud Boys, the alt-right, The Oath Keepers, in fact, anyone who had a grudge.  He also got the unquestioning backing of Fox News who daily sacrificed their journalistic integrity to support him and he somehow managed to get the evangelicals onside even though he is the antithesis of everything they stand for.

Like a good farmer, he assiduously nurtured his Base, mulching and watering them daily.  Using lies, misdirections, misrepresentations, exaggerations, deflections and hoaxes faster than a school shooter spits bullets from his AR 15 assault rifle, he won the 2016 elections against the polling expectations and probably even his own.  When he assumed office, it was obvious that he hadn’t thought things through.  Like the dog that actually catches the car it’s chasing – what does he do with it?  Using medieval English royalty monikers, he would have been called, King Trump, The Unready.  After four chaotic years the Orange Jesus was ignominiously booted out of office by a sentient Zimmer frame.

Emboldened by the Base, Trump denied losing and still uses it as a rallying cry for them along with all his victimhood falsehoods.  Rallying for his re-election in 2024, he turbocharged his trusty playbook.  He added talking points of inflation, that all illegal immigrants are probably MS 13 or Trens de Aragua gang members, of shredding the Federal behemoth and how he was going to use tariffs to screw the whole world to usher in America’s new Golden Era.  In between all this he appealed to the heart of the Base by repeatedly promising to release all the files of their favourite conspiracies – Area 51 and UFOs, the JFK and MLK assassinations and finally the Epstein paedophile files.

He kept his promise but the releases were been decidedly tepid.  Over a month ago when Pam Bondi was asked about the Epstein client list which the alt-right were salivating about, she said it was sitting on her desk.  It is undeniable common knowledge that Epstein and Trump were bff’s for over a decade before they had a falling out over a real estate deal so it is obvious that Trump’s name would feature prominently given their shared proclivities as regards women.  Even if they were not lolitas, the optics would be disastrous and that is one thing that Trump is attuned to.  When the list was not published, the Base started erupting. Bondi then revised her statement to remove the specific reference to the client list.  The frustrated Base went wild and rebelled when they realised they had been played.

In a classic Trumpian manoeuvre, he reframed his promised drive to get to the bottom of the Epstein case as a hoax perpetrated by the Biden administration as he stated, “I can say this. Those files were run by the worst scum on Earth. They were run by Comey, they were run by Garland, they were run by Biden and all of the people that actually ran the government, including the autopen.”

This is classic political gaslighting – making people believe the opposite to reality.  The ultimate shell game – now you see it, now you don’t.

What happened to the dream?

27/28^th April 1994 were miracle days for South Africa when it witnessed the first truly democratic elections in the country.  Sure, there was some pre-election violence particularly between the IFP and the ANC jockeying for power, but compared to other countries in history who had gone through such a radical and virtually overnight upheaval of their existing order, this was remarkably benign.

One positive takeaway that became legend from those days was the voting line – the snaking queues of people patiently waiting under the African sun to make their mark for the promise of a better future.  That voting line became a symbol of our transition.  Port Elizabeth has celebrated it with the Voting Line sculpture on the Donkin Reserve overlooking the town.  It comprises 67 life size people from all walks of life cut from stainless steel plate and strung out in a meandering queue ending up with Madiba at the base of Port Elizabeth’s gargantuan flagpole pole.  Heady stuff.

For a while we dared to dream even through Mbeki’s pipedreams and misguided pontifications, and Zuma’s selfish corruption.  But, 31 years on, we have reached the point of no return.  At best, we are a perpetual mediocrity, a continually failing state that is one misstep away from the vortex of a Zimbabwean descent into economic hell.

What has brought on SMAC’s dystopian view of the future?  It was the report last week that applications for the 5,500 Police positions had closed after – wait for it – 1,000,000 had been received!  Really!  Is being a policeman such a nice job that everyone just wants to be one?  Obviously not!  The uplifting concept of the voting line has been replaced by the unemployment line, the SASSA queues and the job application line (and crime of course).

The bald truth is that the ANC has failed the country – dismally.  While it has been laser focussed on ideology and transformation, and while underwriting corruption, it has forgotten or does not know how to grow the economy at a rate faster than the population and illegal immigrant growth rate.  Pro rata, the economic pie has got smaller exacerbated by the increasingly skewed wealth distribution among Blacks leading to desperation as witnessed by the police job applications.

It might be argued that from such a wide selection, those lucky 5,500 successful candidates will represent the best choice after race, gender and disability ratios have been met but do they really want to be cops?  No!  They have no deep-down internal desire to be the good guy and to catch the bad guy.  All they want is a government job – a sinecure for life.  They will never have pride in their work and strive to make a difference.  Of those 5,500 successful desperados, some will do well but many will relax once appointed and consign the police service to mediocrity for the rest of their lives and that is the ultimate crime – the price of 31 years of ANC failure stretching on to a future of continual failure.