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.
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.
America rightfully protested in the No Kings rally that they did not wish their country to be governed by a kinglike leader. But maybe they should have protested as well about his King Midas touch. We know he likes to touch nice things and now nothing in the White House is safe from his cold gold touch. His décor sense along with the rest of his brain suffers from arrested development and can be summed up as Arab Chic. It’s a pity the rest of him wasn’t arrested at the same time.
The latest to feel King Midas’ unwelcome grope is the Lincoln bathroom in the White House. Maybe the green tiling isn’t to everyone’s taste, but he traded in old style warmth for a sterile marble wasteland with gold highlights. If it wasn’t for his fake face tan, he could play hide-and-seek with Melania and she would never find him in there. His pallid old man’s body and veinous legs would blend right in with the veined marble. Then again, she probably wouldn’t look very hard, if at all.
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?
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.
The madcap red cap maggots think Trump’s policies are to DEI for on the back of Trump advocating for no queens (and hating Queens along with the rest of New York). Meanwhile America is shouting back, “No Kings”. Republicans answer that the No Kings movement consists of people who hate America and are actually members of that most dangerous of all terrorist organisations – Antifa.
For people who don’t follow US politics, antifa merely means anti-fascist to describe people who reject fascism – an honourable standard to uphold. It is not an organization in any shape or form, but is used as a slur much like branding a person a communist during the McCarthy era. Why it is so gleefully used by Republicans against people who refuse to go along with their diktats is that, I believe, it conjures up the word Intifada in people’s minds. This resonates with MAGA because Intifada is an Arabic word for a rebellion or uprising and was specifically used to describe Palestinian resistance to Israel in the First Intifada (1987–1993) and the Second Intifada (2000–2005).
The rash of popular ‘No Kings’ protests against the indiscriminate use of presumptive Presidential executive orders, that have little or no legal basis, harkens back 250 years to the American war of Independence against a distant monarchy that existed in a gilded bubble. (Alright, Britain was a sort of democracy but there was no universal franchise and the King held enormous sway.) Trump’s unique approach to the Presidency along with a compliant Supreme court threatens to hollow out all the underpinnings of America’s democracy and turn it into a horrible tribute show for the Orange Jesus.
Contrary to Trump’s vain boasts which, as usual, are light on facts, he is proving to be an unpopular President. He and all his toadies and the ‘Voice of America’, Fox News, repeatedly state that his resounding victory gave him a mandate. Really? A mandate to do what – to upend the whole well balanced American democracy with a machine gun blast of vile executive orders like a demented rapper high on his tanning spray?
It is true that the Republicans also won both houses and control the Supreme court 6 – 3, but let’s look at his personal mandate. Yes, he did beat Harris by 2.28m votes but this was after she replaced the doddery Biden on the slate with only 107 days to go. It should be noted that he did not actually receive more than 50% of all the votes cast. Also, “Slo Joe, I call him Slo Joe, you know” had actually beaten Trump by 7m votes previously. So much for his popularity.
As the 47th President, he is the most unpopular President ever at this stage of his incumbency with a 37% approval rating. To achieve this high honour, he had to beat that other most unpoular President, Donald J Trump Jr, in his previous incarnation as the 45th President which he has done handsomely.
Back to the No Kings rallies. While the tacky King Midas with his golden décor touch skulked and sulked in his personal shrine at Mar-a-Lago complete with fake Times magazine covers about himself, 7 million Americans turned out in all 50 states in 2700 protests to express their displeasure. With crowds seething with cartoon figures, narco blow up frog costumes, out of control horny unicorns, protesting grannies and sarcastic posters, not one shot was fired, no tear gas or smoke had to be deployed and everyone was happy without having to get high first. It was remarkably unifying.
As the US motto fittingly states, “E pluribus unum” (out of many, one).
Trump selects people based on their preparedness to do his will whether they’re in his cabinet, staff or key Federal positions. Good looks also play a large part in this – think Kristi Noem, Karoline Leavitt, Pam Bondi and, most recently, Lindsey Halligan. Competence is not a key requirement, in fact, it is not a requirement at all. Witness the case of Halligan who was appointed to the high position of interim US attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia but has no prosecutorial experience – nil, zero, nada, zilch. At least she can do no damage. She can only irk Trump’s perceived enemies by executing his retributive legal attacks. Other credentials for appointment to high office is to have been employed at His Master’s Voice, Faux News, where they graduate in the art of arse kissing – 23 so far this year.
Trump was elected by choosing hot button issues for the conservative Americans and inflaming the hell out of them with his freewheeling and fact-free style to the point that each group with a grievance was prepared to overlook his personal factory defects and the other issues that they didn’t believe in. Pursuing this strategy, he surpassed himself by appointing a person who is unqualified in a job that affects the lives of every American, is a conspiracy theorist and, to top it all, a clown – Robert F Kennedy, or RFK, of the Kennedy political dynasty.
RFK copied Trump’s signature MAGA movement with the slogan of MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) when he was appointed Health Secretary. This is a man who claimed he had a parasitic worm that ate part of his brain and then died – probably of indigestion. He loves eating roadkill and has swum in water known to be contaminated with sewerage. Like Halligan, his credentials for the job could be listed on a fridge magnet – none. However, he did bring along all the medical conspiracy kooks into Trump’s camp. Although he vaccinated his own children, he has since changed his stance. Even before Covid and the mRNA-based vaccines came along, he bought into the concept that the MMR (mumps, measles and rubella) vaccine causes autism. That whole movement was based on a statistically insignificant study that has been comprehensively debunked. As Health Secretary, he has had to backtrack on his opinions and has weaseled out by saying that the state should not be telling people what to do. He is not even prepared to state that it is recommended to vaccinate.
Ever since Louis Pasteur discovered the principles of vaccination in the 1860s, it has been the most successful medical intervention ever developed. Only the discovery of penicillin comes close. Gone are the scourges of smallpox which wiped out swathes of people particularly in parts of the ‘new world’ when the Europeans introduced their culture with a side order of smallpox Gone too is polio which saw rows of children in wards filled with iron lung machines and people, like my father with a withered leg, or rubella which can cause blindness and deafness in foetuses. Pasteur’s other great contribution to society’s health was the discovery of germs and how pasteurisation of milk can eliminate the many possible infections caused by drinking untreated milk. RFK is passionate about this too.
Having started worrying about vaccination and autism, his latest mission is to find the causes of autism. This has been studied for years without any answers yet he reckons he can nail it down in a few months. Pressure from Trump, obviously desperate to deflect from a reputation infected by the Epstein virus, led to premature ejaculation by RFK. In a hard-on press briefing on 22 September, he announced that his study group had found a link between acetaminophen (paracetamol) and autism. Trump in a stable genius moment doubled down and then repeatedly directed pregnant women not to take Tylenol (because he couldn’t pronounce the chemical name) which could make him liable to a law suit. In the latest televised cabinet meeting on 10 October, RFK contradicted his premature ejaculation without an apology about the mess he created and said, “It is not proof. We’re doing studies to make proof.”
American Gothic is one of the most famous American paintings of the 20th century. Britannica gives the following interpretation of the painting: With its completion at the beginning of the Great Depression, some interpret the painting as a satirical comment on the unwillingness of rural Americans, and more specifically Midwesterners, to catch up with the modernizing world. That seems like a reasonable description of your common or garden MAGA supporter. So, given the dark times America is going through and the collapse of the American Dream, SMAC decided to make light of these times by reimagining the American Gothic
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.
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.
