The Opinion Pieces are an eclectic bunch on current affairs & history often with a human interest aspect. The Movie/DVDs reviews are mainly on documentaries with a smattering of movie reviews.
On Sunday, 19 August, Infantino the Terrible awarded Trump his last ball and gave him a golden shower which took Trump back to the heady days of 2013.
For those who don’t know the context, the Roger Steele intelligence report of 2017 reported that during Trump’s visit to the Miss World pageant in Moscow in early November 2013, he arranged for prostitutes to perform a golden shower routine on the bed that Barack and Michelle Obama used during their visit to Moscow years before. For those of you who don’t know what a golden shower is, SMAC’s lips are sealed – that’s what Google’s for.
This, of course, was delicious and salacious and any other kind of -cious kompromat (Russian term for compromising material useful for bribing) and fed the story of Russian interference in the 2016 US Presidential elections. Trump, as is his wont, denies it and goes so far as to say that he wasn’t even there. The latter is a proven lie and as James Comey, erstwhile FBI Director who investigated Trump, points out that when someone lies about one thing in an investigation, all bets are off concerning his credibility, not that it’s ever worried Trump before – it’s his standard operating procedure and he probably secretly gets off on it. Trump just says they’re tall stories after all Comey is 6’ 8” (2.03m for advanced nations) and throws shade on Trump.
Some more context to the photos: No Trump rally would be complete without a “Sir, . . .” or a “Daddy, . . .” story. Now those are truly tall stories, just like Trump’s claimed current height of 1.91m (6’ 3” for backward Americans).
It is doubtful that Trump reads and, if he does, he definitely doesn’t read for meaning. In fact, he probably considers it demeaning, after all possessing the world’s greatest intellect means that nobody can teach him anything. So, it is quite ironic that he is going to build a huge presidential library.
Ok, ok. A presidential library is more than your bog-standard library. They have become a feature of every president of the United States since Herbert Hoover (31st president, 1929–1933). It’s more like a time capsule of what went down during the tenure, or reign in Trump’s case, of the president with the focus on events surrounding him. Naturally there will be a lot of memorabilia alongside all the documents and records.
For Trump it will be the ultimate brag wall and include such historic pieces such as his fake FIFA Peace Prize and tacky gifts from sycophantic tinpot dictators. It will be a completely immersive experience of life inside Trump’s arsehole. There will be lots of merch like personally signed MAGA* caps and probably a complete box set of his 900 plus rallies.
It is another one of his grifts – it is to be built on 2.6-acre prime waterfront real estate worth $67 million and previously owned by the Miami Dade College. The Board of Trustees of this public institution magnanimously decided to give it back to the state and then, in late September 2025, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis grifted it to Trump’s presidential library foundation.
T4 (Trump, The Tacky TACO) has already teased what his library will look like. A foreplay of the library was presented on the Trump Library Foundation’s website. It is roughly a 50-storey glass building that looks more like an hotel or office block, the upper blocks of which Trump has already teased will so be – another Trump grift in plain sight. Naturally the exterior will prominently feature Trump’s name emblazoned in gold and massive portraits of himself. The ground floor will be given over to a display of military jets and the Qatari grifted Boeing 747 presidential jet. There will be a massive golden ballroom room, a replica Oval Office complete with his tacky gold tat on the walls and finally a massive auditorium with a 5 times life-size golden statue of Trump in a defiant pose.
From small beginnings great libraries grow – maybe.
The books are as fake as their owner, just like the old Texan saying – all hat, but no cattle.
Many people have had a species named after them and it is normally considered an honour. If Trump had known about it, he would have sought that honour as he likes to put his Trump stamp on everything except it would have to be on something dominating like a new species of lion. Well, he got this unsought-for recognition except it was for a micro-moth discovered in California in 2017. Since there is mutual animosity between the state and Trump, it’s a reasonable assumption that the discoverer had a wicked sense of humour.
PS. He also had another unflattering species named after him, the Tetragramma donaldtrumpi – a species of fossil sea urchins. All we need now is a newly discovered version of pond life to be named after him.
(For those of you that can’t figure out a lot of Shakespearean English like me, wherefore means why. And for those who don’t follow Trump too closely, and I don’t recommend it, he leaves a foul smell behind, literally and figuratively)
Trump has a predilection for frantically marking his territory like a junkyard mutt. His whole commercial life has been about branding and selling you stuff or aspirations that you don’t really want or need. We’re talking about Trump Towers, Trump Airlines, Trump Steaks, Trump University and much, much more.
Now that he’s become President again – the first time was just a vainglorious TV reality show called The Apprentice President – he’s taken his grifting and branding to a new level by selling Trump smartphones, Trump UFC Medallions, Trump Stablecoins, . . . – the list is endless. But he’s gone further by redecorating Federal buildings in his trademark trashy gold Arab chic and planning to add monuments in his name.
The Kennedy Center is a prime example of Trump’s egregious behaviour. He decided that he wished to place his Trump Stamp on it. Using his executive powers, he fired the board and replaced them with toadies who then elected him Chairman. On 18 December 2025, the board voted to append his trashy name to that of Kennedy’s. Meanwhile, in the background he had lined up the contractor who prepared the new signage. The next day a contractor, who was locked and loaded, arrived on site and added Trump’s name within a few hours – a preplanned assault to make it fait accompli before anyone could do anything about it. The only thing wrong in Trump’s eyes was that his name was not in gold.
Job done, or so he thought. The popular backlash was immediate and massive. Booked performances pulled out to the extent that Trump closed the Center for ‘renovations’ for two years. One of the planned décor ‘improvements’ was to replace the theatre armrests with cold unyielding marble ones – really! He even showed off samples he had produced.
The judicial blowback took a few months but on 29 May a judge ordered that his name be removed within 14 days.
The bully boy, Trump, has met his match in China and a devastating opening salvo was fired in World War XI. There have been prior skirmishes initiated by Trump in his trade war with China and the rest of the world but China kept it’s cool while Trump conducted his in-your-face international ‘diplomacy’ on Truth Social and ad hoc pressers.
Trump has a history of denigrating whole countries and their leaders through social media, via pressers and even face-to-face. In his first term, as one childish example, he kept on getting into handshake powerplay contests with President Macron.
The most egregious was during a White House televised press conference with Zelensky of Ukraine on 28 February 2025. First, a right-wing journalist, Brian Glenn, attacked him for not wearing a suit and tie while JD Vance looked on with a smirk. Very soon Zelensky was attacked by the tag team of Vance and Trump and then kicked out of the White House. Trump has routinely sided with Putin forgetting that the US signed security guarantees when Ukraine gained independence from the USSR (note: it was not part of Russia but the USSR) in return for handing all nuclear weapons to Russia thereby losing one huge bargaining chip.
Ever desperate to be admired as the greatest world leader, he was hoping that he could parlay the state visit into another trophy for his boast wall. It was not to be. Instead, he was humiliated straight from the get-go when he was greeted by a minor flunky and 250 little kids – shots fired. And it was downhill from there. The exquisite denouement came on the final day when they were seated either side of a low table for a televised press event. The cushion of the chair that Trump sat in was significantly lower than Chairman Xi’s high chair while Trump had to sit in the low chair like the man-child that he is.
This was a deliberate snub and showed who was really in charge. Game, set and match to Xi and trump (the lack of capitalization is deliberate – a sign of the times/future) knows it. China would not have done this 10 years ago. Instead of Making America Great Again, all trump has succeeded in doing is to hasten the fall of the America Imperial Empire by a few decades. His natural friends in Europe and Canada shun him and are moving everyday to delink themselves from an unreliable ally who they can’t trust anymore. We see this with Europe withdrawing their gold reserves held in the US, the preference for new fighter aircraft and early warning planes to be European, the withdrawal at government level, initially, from American software suites and cloud services to regain their sovereignty which they ceded to the US slowly over the last few decades. The list goes on.
The move by Xi was minor in the greater scheme of things but it is the canary in the coal mine. We can see why he’s called chairman Xi! While trump raucously threatens total annihilation of Iran, China quietly delivered the total humiliation of America.
Words from great orators take flight like busy little hummingbirds in some cases or soar majestically like eagles in others. With Trump, his words fall to the ground like flightless LBJs (Little Brown Jobs – a technical avian term). That is perhaps why he has so much animus for Obama with his simple but noble oratory. He is sublime where Trump is subterranean.
Psychiatrists have looked at his verbal skills over the years and have noticed a remarkable decrease in his vocabulary and a corresponding increase in garbled messages. His sentences nowadays are simplistic and like limp day-old word salads.
Trump has no shame and no boundaries. On 13 April he posted a dramatic AI drawing of himself as Jesus healing a sick man against a patriotic martial background and surrounded by his flock (his MAGA base). This caused an immediate uproar from most Christians.
Although drowning in his declining mental capacity, he still has his showman instincts much like a dog will instinctively attempt to chase a cat till the day it dies. Instead of apologizing, he attempted to create a new narrative by saying that he thought that it showed him as a doctor. Really? Ag Pleez!
Some saner heads advised Trump to pull the ad but the message from his executive was deflection. JD adVanced the theory that Trump was just joking. (Perhaps the J in Trump’s initials should rather stand for Joker.) Sorry JD, but you’re just digging the hole deeper if not wider. Your stupidity should disqualify you from being Vice President. Oops, my mistake. It seems as if stupidity actually is a bonus feature for the executive team.
To redeem himself further, particularly after his personal attacks on Pope Leo, he turned to dishonesty in portraying himself as a God-fearing Christian by getting his team, led by himself, to each read a few verses from each chapter of the Bible on TV. (So much for the separation of church and state.)
Ever since he started his drive to become president in 2016, he has co-opted Christianity and, somehow, they fell for it although he has routinely broken about 8 of the 10 commandments and the only God he worships is Himself. (Oops, and money, and women, and …) Hence SMAC thinks that the Fraud’s Prayer is appropriate.
(Note this is only a barebones summary with most of the contradictory statements of the Trump regime omitted.)
Aeschylus, the Greek tragic dramatist, coined the maxim: In war, truth is the first casualty. The Prussian military analyst, Carl von Clausewitz, referred to the fog of war where decision makers have a very vague view of what is actually going on. In this regard, Trump has no peers. Given his penchant for lies, exaggerations, mis-directions, U-turns and obfuscations, these sayings are not only pertinent to the Iranian war thus far, but also to the status of the negotiations towards a peace deal and any of the supposed deals struck along the way, hence the fog of peace.
The day after the initial strikes on 28 February, Trump claimed that Iran was totally obliterated and they were prepared to negotiate, which he agreed to. This was immediately denied on both counts by the Iranians and the war continued against the ‘obliterated’ Iranian army. On March 6, 2026 Trump demanded “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!”. On March 9, Trump said that “the war is very complete, pretty much”, and falsely claimed that the Iranian military had been destroyed again and the Strait of Hormuz had re-opened. A month later and it still hasn’t.
On March 21, it was reported that the US was preparing for potential peace talks with Iran, with six demands that Iran had previously rejected. On March 23, Trump postponed the ultimatum he had given on reopening the Strait of Hormuz, which he claimed had been opened two days previously, citing “very good and productive conversations” with “a top person” in Iran and claimed “They called, I didn’t call. They want to make a deal, and we are very willing to make a deal”. Iran denied there had been any negotiations with Trump. Trump again claimed on 24 March that the US and Israel had “won” the war, even though both sides continued their attacks and the Hormuz Strait remained closed. On 26 March, Trump said that Iran was “begging” for a deal.
Iran’s intransigence stymied and embarrassed Trump forcing him to up his threats on 30 March 2026 to destroy all of Iran’s power plants, oil wells and desalination plants if a deal was not reached “shortly” and the Hormuz Strait not reopened “immediately”. After days of spurious deal announcements mixed with dire threats, he finally issued a 48-hour Götterdämmerungultimatum. The world held its breath and oil spiked. With two hours to go on 7 April, Trump announced that talks would be held in Pakistan and there would be a two-week ceasefire. Armageddon had been averted. The world breathed a sigh of relief, oil retreated and stock markets jumped. It was not to last as Israel continued to pound Hezbollah and Iran retaliated with missiles. Although Trump continued to promote the idea that they were getting close to a deal, Fox News, a staunch supporter, nevertheless showed the graphic below – the gulf between the parties was wider than the Straits of Hormuz. On 11 April JD Vance and his sidekicks arrived in Pakistan for negotiations. After a 21-hour session the talks collapsed and Trump threatened a “full naval blockade” on Iran.
Here we go again, rinse and repeat.
Perhaps the title should rather be, The Frog of Peace, as it seems that it gets stuck in everyone’s throats.
Although possessing the strongest navy in the world, America dares not send its fleets into the narrow seas around the Straits of Hormuz that sees 20% of world oil exports. In the absence of US military dominance of the area, Iran controls the flow of ships through it with cheap air and sea drones and there’s nothing Trump can do about it. Iran’s illogical intransigence in the face of dire threats to remove their civilization from future history books and America’s impotence is driving Trump mad in all senses of the word as witnessed by his expletive filled Truth Social rant on 5 April, 48 hours before his final deadline.
One of the keys to Trump’s success (in America) is that he owns the news cycle. He probably devotes a half of his waking hours to communicating via Truth Social rants, televised White House meetings and Dear Leader Cabinet praise sessions, TV show phone-ins, quick pressers in the presidential jet or even on the way to his helicopter that takes him to the jet. Between that, plotting against his enemies and his continual golf playing (one day in four) one wonders where he finds the time to get properly briefed on National and International issues and to formulate coherent policies. This need to fill the air with so many words means that many times he contradicts even what he said earlier that very day.
