A different view on current affairs & history
Trump has brought his unique bully-boy, manchild character to Washington. Along with this came his barely formed aesthetic – white and gold – and he is steadily changing the White House into a Washington version of his Mar-a-Laager private club crossed with his bankrupt Taj Mahal casino. Given his immature sense of style, he is probably somewhere on the autistic spectrum and suffers from ADADHD – Arrested Development, Attention Deficit, Hype-ing Disorder.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies. – Groucho Marx.
Along with all his other factory defects, this saying describes Trump as a politician pretty well. What it does not say about him is the insulting and threatening way he applies his wayward policies via executive orders, ‘Truth’ Social posts or demands on the stump.
Then of course, there is the reversal of his position, sometimes multiple times. In a recent example, earlier in this term he stated that he would “aggressively revoke” Chinese student visas because they were stealing America’s technology. This Monday, he did a complete volte-face, or is it a volte-farce, when he welcomed Chinese students but was ambivalent about the French just because he dislikes President Micron. In fact, every time they meet, he gets into a pissing contest with an endless who-has-the-manliest handshake.
Throughout his life Trump has used his wealth and thick skin to exaggerate, lie and bully everyone he has had business dealings with. In 2016 he suddenly found himself CEO of the biggest corporation in the world, USA Inc. He created a shambles then but he still had his training wheels on. After he lost to Biden, he spent four years having a pity party while marinating in his grievances and applying Mac sauce on his bone spurs. All the while he was building up a head of steam and had the support of Project 2025 with their 1000-page manifesto of how to govern America outside of the legal system and every rule, regulation and norm that has restrained every President before him. Basically his approach is, “I don’t give a F%$K!” After all, his toadies in the Supreme Court had his back when they ruled that he had immunity as long as his actions had something vaguely to do with being President.
Having created a cabinet of unqualified dingleberries[1] prepared to do anything, he has attacked his political enemies, real or imaginary, bombed Iran’s nuclear program into oblivion, made enemies of America’s strongest ally, Canada, alienated most western democracies, ignited a tariff war, sometimes for non-technical reasons, which is not his right under American or international law, pardoned Jan 6 insurrectionists and election officials trying to carry out his illegal wishes, gutted just about every Federal agency responsible for keeping America sane and safe – medically, environmentally, educationally, flying safely, predicting the weather correctly – and has sicced the Justice Department on everyone and everything he does not like, particularly immigrants. All the while he dares all the courts up to the Supreme Court to rein him in. He has halted all programs to provide clean energy while China adds more solar annually than what exists in America. He has withheld grants from top universities which he dislikes and opines that he knows better than engineers that old-tech steam catapults are best.
He is a President without precedent. All around him is chaos, dysfunction and mayhem. Yet he continues to live his King Midas dream while everything he touches proves to be fool’s gold.
[1] Dingleberry – a small piece of dried faeces clinging to the hair around the anus of an animal or person.
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.
Who knows how Trump’s worm’s eye view of the world perceives the Russian invasion (oops, Special Operation) of Ukraine? His stance has undergone more changes than a chameleon wading through Smarties, but in Trump’s case, not so smarties. He has flipped flopped from threats against Russia only to change a week or two later. In this opinion piece SMAC has undertaken to lay bare Trump’s motivations and for that SMAC deserves a Nobel Prize of some sorts.
To start off, one must understand the basic inner workings of Trump. He’s not clever, but he’s smart in a reptilian brain sort of way. And just like his primordial ancestors, he has an incredibly thick skin and an inability to be embarrassed. In fact, he has nil self-awareness.
First point to consider is whether Putin has anything compromising on the fat frat boy. Undoubtedly he has. Putin is an old-school apparatchik and ex-KGB officer. This is spycraft 101 for the Russians – get or engineer kompromat (compromising material) through a honeytrap or bribe. One must factor in that Moscow hosted his Miss Universe pageant in 2013. The Steele dossier is a 35-page report that contains hectic, but unsubstantiated allegations. Nevertheless, one of the most salacious ones was that, while he was in Moscow, he hired prostitutes to perform a ‘golden shower’ on a bed that Obama had used on a state visit as president in order to defile it. Sounds just like the petty Don.
But ultimately Trump is amoral. First and foremost, the world revolves around himself and as a businessman, he does not let any morals cloud the deal. While he was in Russia back then, he was feeling out real estate opportunities, but all that took a backseat after Russia annexed Crimea and provided paramilitary support to rebels in Donbas and Luhansk on Ukraine’s eastern border in 2014.
But that desire has never left Trump and he knows that if he can force an advantageous peace deal on Ukraine, Russia will richly reward him with great opportunities and he might wangle a Peace Prize. Just contrast his approaches to dealing with Putin and Zelensky. Immediately after Putin’s 2022 invasion he praised Putin as being brilliant while his European and Nato allies were aghast. Since then, he has never had a constant position regarding Russia. One day he takes a hard line and then after a meeting with Putin or a phone call, Trump does a 180 degree turn and insists Ukraine accept a ceasefire on Putin’s terms.
Who will ever forget that reality TV farce that Trump and his cabinet engineered with Zelensky in the White House on 28 February. With the cameras rolling, Zelensky was humiliated by a Trump tag team who created an embarrassing spat by insisting that his trademark attire (no tie) was disrespectful to Trump. Trump wrapped up the distasteful display by saying to Zelensky that “(y)ou don’t have the cards (to play)” so you had better give up right now. Putin must have been so chuffed that he probably ordered himself another Dacha on the Crimean coast. Contrast that with Trump’s obsequious behaviour when he met with Putin in Alaska in mid-August.
Also just a week or two ago, Trump started publicly threatening to give long range Tomahawk cruise missiles to Ukraine because of Putin’s unrelenting missile/drone reign of terror on civilian targets. A 20th October meeting was arranged between Trump and Zelensky at the White House ostensibly to finalise the deal. Two days before it, Putin phoned Trump and whispered endearments in his ear. Zelensky’s trip was rendered meaningless as Trump refused the Tomahawks and apparently a very heated meeting ensued. Then a few days later Trump u-turned again and announced crushing oil sanctions against Russia.
I wonder what Putin will have to do now to bring his pet to heel?
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Trump’s décor sense is a reflection of himself: gross, cheap, tacky – choose your personal descriptor. The overblown gold embellishments in the Oval Orifice, and any of his developments for that matter, make it look like an Arab souk.
In 2016, he surprised even himself by winning the elections, but he was like the dog that chased the car and caught it. Now what! He did minor redecorating to his taste as all presidents have done, but nothing overly dramatic. However, in between playing golf, getting briefed by his cabinet at Fox News, and stumbling and bumbling through his presidency, he did unleash Melania on the historic Rose Garden. She acquitted herself well and reduced the slightly wild but colourful space to one that was a reflection of herself – “sterile, bland and devoid of any joy”. Still, it could have been verse (her guttural Slavic pronunciation). In fact, worse was to befall when Trump conquered the White House during his second coming. This time he was prepared.
In his second term he started off by paving over Melania’s carefully coiffed lawn with limestone slabs to create an even more sterile place reflective of their marriage and then boastfully erected two over-hyped flagpoles. (Note, the minor provincial town of Port Elizabeth has a flagpole twice their height). On a roll he tackled the Oval Office. He has gone over the top on the signature Trump-style décor, probably salvaged from his bankrupted Taj Mahal casino. After turning it into a gold leaf tinsel town, his childish petulance could not resist his next move. He created a walk of fame on a wall of the West Wing colonnade by hanging baroque gilded framed photos of all the past presidents in order. Bracketed by snarling portraits of himself was Biden – a photograph only of his signature and the Autopen used to create it – phew, way to go big boy.
But all the gold touches and photos glorifying himself didn’t satisfy his itch. There was something missing. Deep down amidst all the froth of his reality shows, his transactional marriages and transactional affairs, his various presidencies, and his serial bankruptcies (6), he was a property developer at heart. It wasn’t good enough being a temporary tenant, he wanted to play God and remake the White House in his own image, his personal shrine.
In a flash of inspiration after inhaling a Big Mac, he knew what he didn’t like about the White House. It reminded him of skinny jeans which he hates (because amongst other things, he could never wear them and Obama could) – NO BALLROOM. Now this was a development project he could get his veneered teeth into to take his mind off his unrequited dream of a Nobel Prize now in peaces and his tariff war blowing up in his face.
At the end of July he announced the project to build a 90,000ft2 (8370m2 or 2.1 acres) ballroom with a capacity of 650 people to replace the current ballroom of 200 people capacity in the East Wing. He stated that it “won’t interfere with the current building. … It will be near it but not touching it, and pays total respect to the existing building, which I’m the biggest fan of.” It should be noted that the two floors and basement of the central core of the White House have an area of 45000ft. The model showed a rectangular structure of about 88x48m (a rugby field is 100x50m) dwarfing the seat of America power. He is determined to finish it before the end of his term and, as usual, has bulldozed or ignored just about every authority mandated to deal with a program such as this. As always, Trump cannot be taken at his word. The capacity is now 990 and when the demolition started it looks as though the whole corridor up to the core will also be demolished, so who knows how the plans have changed.
Republicans have cravenly defended Trump by saying that even Obama made drastic changes – yes, he changed a tennis court into a basketball court!
God help the White House if he wangles a turd term.
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!”
AI stands for Artificial Intelligence but it also stands for Artificial Insemination. Are they independent concepts or intertwined in the world going forward?
Undoubtedly AI is going to revolutionise the human experience. But, is it going to be worse than the car which quickly made farriers, livery stables, poop picker uppers and the like redundant. What about the desktop computer which overnight forced the typing pool to either return to homemaking or to rapidly upskill themselves. An interesting feature will be that while all previous technological changes from the industrial revolution onwards badly affected the working class, this will affect the middle class.
But the worst effect will be on the body of ‘truth’ that underpins the human experience. Up to now, hard truths, like science and history, are directly relatable to some physical artefact. However, AI seems to generate new hard ‘truths’ as well as push new soft ones.
The problem that once a ‘truth’ has been generated it’s out there in the digital universe forever and cannot be removed. When researching a topic, AI will incorporate its other, possibly falsely generated, AI truths in conclusions going forward. This is technically called positive feedback which is not the “Well done Janet,” you receive from the teacher for a good answer. In the real world of cause and effect it’s a bad thing. Like the microphone that picks up the sound from a loudspeaker and feeds the louder sound back into the amplifier to make it even louder and so on until it’s an ear-splitting screech within milliseconds. The AI generated ‘truth’ ends up feeding off its own reality and thereby true reality gets debased. Sure, we can try to check its veracity but it can generate outputs far faster than we can debunk them and this doesn’t even take into account bad actors or countries that wilfully distort reality. Musk’s Grok was a recent example when it went off piste and seemed to incorporate Hitler and the Nazis into any answer it generated. Musk blithely stated that they would just tweak the algorithm not to. Huh! Apart from worrying why it did it in the first place, it highlighted how just altering a few parameters can alter how AI sees the world which will eventually end up being how we see the world. Or what about a bunch of legal cases in America in the past year where filings by lawyers using AI included references to non-existent cases!
Decades ago when robots were becoming commonplace, we were not worried that they could take over. After all, we joked, their attention span is only as long as their power cords. With the advent of the all-pervasive internet, that is no longer true. AI will become embedded everywhere.
The reality of the world is that it’s going to be owned by the algorithm and not humans and it will debase it. And so, we come back to what AI means. I believe AI will end up artificially inseminating humans with its version of reality and end up overpowering humans. Moreover, when combined with direct links from the brain to the digital world via things like Musk’s Neuralink, the future is truly frightening for mere mortals. The film, The Matrix, was a dystopian but reasonably accurate presentation of what brave new world awaits us. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
When I started this piece, I wondered what a Grok, Musk’s AI program, would look like. For a bit of fun, I asked ChatGPT what it thought. In a flash it came back with a comprehensive and fluent description. I was shaken as I had asked it to conceptualize something that didn’t exist and it did so without breaking a sweat or batting an AI-lid. I decided to anthropomorphize a Pac-Man but chose a green colour without any reason other than human gut feeling (and I’m proud of that undefinable concept). The dots represent anything that has been digitised by humans, be it data, images, science, history, creative stuff, thoughts, etc, and the product of AI itself in the future which will eventually overwhelm human input. The ghosts represent whatever you wish them to be.
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?
27/28th 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.
There is no ceiling to Trump’s character flaws. Is his desire to have the glitziest or biggliest or largest just part of his crass and puerile showmanship because he’s not very bright and it’s the only game he knows: or does he suffer from inadequacy issues?
We saw recently how in awe he was of the Emir of Qatar’s cast-off luxury jet which was a younger model than his and was more tastefully decorated in gold than his clunkier old jet. It seems to parallel his trading in of wives for younger models until he ended up with the most transactional and iciest of them all. Judging by the body language, he’s not getting any nooky at home and since he can’t grab them by the kitty cat or spend his down time with porn stars anymore, he’s taken to groping the US flag and even kissing it. So being the self-crowned Midas king of bad taste and MAGA, it is natural that he desired a public display of the erection of the mightiest symbol, the US flag on the largest flagpole he could afford. In a cringeworthy televised vaudeville act he supervised the exxxxxxx of his gift to America. He thought he was very clever referring to the e-word multiple times and saying that he couldn’t say it, nudge, nudge, wink, wink. What a raconteur this man thinks he is. Apart from its height of 88ft (26,8m) or 100ft (30,5m), depending on the report, he waxed lyrical and spewed unsubstantiated superlatives about the attributes of his erection to the fawning reporters so perhaps we should put it into perspective.-
What many SMAC consumers don’t know is that SMAC moonlights (or is it the other way around) as a hack historian on Port Elizabeth. The heights commanding the Port Elizabeth CBD and harbour are known as the Donkin Reserve and can arguably be considered the founding point of the town. It was here that the Acting Governor of the Cape Colony, Sir Rufane Donkin, designated the surrounding area to be known as Port Elizabeth, named after his beloved late wife Elizabeth, and erected a pyramid as a memorial to her. Astute readers will note that I do not refer to Gqeberha as that was just a general name given to the area by the Khoi en route from one pastoral gig to another and they weren’t hanging around to erect pyramids and do civic stuff. (Miaow) He also declared that the area was to remain unencumbered. Apart from the lighthouse, it remained so until the 2010 Soccer World Cup and, also suffering from inadequacy issues, the Council decided to erect the largest flagpole in South Africa. It is 60m (later increased to 68m) and carries a huge flag of 12m x 5m.
That trumps your flagging ego, Donald!
PS. The world’s tallest flagpole at 201m is in Cairo, just another shithole African country. Port Elizabeth’s doesn’t even make the top 50, so where does that leave Trump’s much talked about erection?