Donald J Trump would be coming further down the pike, legend remembers him for his proselytising that if the wealthiest people in a society are politicians, that society is fundamentally corrupt.
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DONALD J Trump may or may not have heard of Harry S Truman. Supposing he did, it would not matter for the Donald. Only, he would not like him anyway, or particularly the profundity of his sagacious quotes. There are many comparable opposites between POTUS 33 and POTUS 47 that put these two figures and their leadership styles at diametrically opposed odds.
While Truman decisively desegregated the military in 1949, ending racial segregation in the US Armed Forces, Trump, through his Christian crusader and Zionist secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, is revisiting the architecture of segregation in the military by removing the eminent pillars like the DEI policy, with the hope of reversing Truman.
It was in 1949 that Truman helped establish the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, or as the American First talking heads now refer to it, the walking dead. Its formation, no doubt, was bolstered by the 1948 Marshall Plan, a $20 billion plus aid program contrived to rebuild Western Europe from the crucibles of World War II. Trump, for his part, may be the last lord of the NATO manor to oversee its demise.
The senator from Missouri whose middle initial “S” did not stand for anything was a creature of fortuity and a sprinkle of historic firsts. He was vice president for 82 days only and succeeded F.D Roosevelt to become the 33rd President of the United States.
As if he knew that Donald J Trump would be coming further down the pike, legend remembers him for his proselytising that if the wealthiest people in a society are politicians, that society is fundamentally corrupt. Predictably, an image of his face is not chiselled and emblazoned on the iconic Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills of South Dakota.
President Donald J. Trump and his family are tireless entrepreneurs, or so they describe themselves when accused of being the most corrupt family ever to assume the reins of office in the history of democratic America.
There was a Trump steak at the downtown Manhattan Trump Tower, and there were Trump sneakers too. There was a Trump casino and a Trump university. Whatever happened to the Trump coin! When a lady who bought a Trump watch received it missing a ‘T’ and read "rump", she had nightmarish visions of Southeast Asian sweatshops inhabited by overworked twelve-year-olds.
Then there was a trip to China, ostensibly for a summit between the obstreperous US visitor and an inscrutable Chinese host, billed as the most important G-2 convocation in the second half of the warring twenties of the 21st century. The meeting having been postponed once, many pundits had speculated, rightly or wrongly, that it was destined to be an all-or-nothing high-stakes gambit, assuming as they did, that they knew what each leader sought out of the encounter.
But the bifurcation of a complex power reality into a zero-sum one-upmanship was a poor intellectual purchase. It did not fully bargain for the petulance of a tweetaholic warmongering White House resident who had once touted himself as the most peace-loving leader of the free world, deserving of a Noble laureate for Peace.
Speculation apart, DJT easily gave his game away somewhat too early. He was like a skeleton in his own closet, who couldn’t wait to reveal himself as the most salacious secret ever kept. With seventeen highly prized CEOs in tow, Eric Trump rounded the number to 18 to bring up the rear.
During his presidential campaign speeches, Donald Trump was vocal in the condemnation of Hunter Biden for accompanying his father to China. He insisted in his mad genius that Hunter had no verifiable credentials during these trips other than being the son of a vice president or that of a president when the scion from Delaware eked out his early octogenarian years in the Oval Office.
Somehow he forgot all that, as Eric Trump, aboard Air Force One, traipsed to the prestigious shindig at the Temple of Heaven and the Hall of the People. Like Hunter Biden, he had no comparable skill to the lot of the CEO’s that lent equanimous accompaniment. And perhaps like Hunter Biden, he was on a mission to close a deal, and in his case specifically, for the supply of the phones eponymously named the Trump Mobile.
It was only after Eric’s return from China that a new message was posted on the Delaware, Inc. company website detailing the new developments about the much-anticipated phone. Specifically, he couldn’t wait to impart his newly acquired wisdom to his exuberant MAGA compatriots. There were three things really. It was the Thucydides Trap, the ‘Buddha-jumping-over-the-wall' meal, and the devil in the detail on the terms of the phone. But I digress!
About the Trump Mobile, sometime in the summer of 2025, the sons of the president and a named collaborator were beaming from ear to ear, filled with patriotic pride, announcing on the introduction of the Trump Mobile or T1 Mobile for a few good reasons. The phone would be made in the USA by US hands, for US citizens.
The phone would pioneer a number of commendable firsts, attracting $500 a set for the privilege. Those who would acquire them by installment had the distinguished honour of paying $47.45 per month, in celebration of DJT as POTUS 47 and previously POTUS 45.
To be fair, so many relevant conditions were scribbled in fine print, which for some reason, did not bother the MAGA enthusiasts. For their blood is white, red and blue. In response, six hundred thousand of them quickly paid a $100 as deposit.
As the days rolled by, turning weeks into months, with the depositors who gifted the Trumps $60 million waiting in anticipation of a ‘made-in-America’ Trump Mobile, the anxieties started mounting.
A few critical attributes of the promise began to change. Inexplicably, the phone would not be made in the USA anymore. Rather, they would be made according to American values, whatever that means! The handset itself may not even be $500 anymore.
The revised arrival date too, got indefinitely postponed. Of the design, floated so effusively on the promoters’ website, it exhibited very unpatriotic flaws. The stripes in the stars and stripes flag of the US of A has thirteen stripes. The phone, to the patriots’ collective dismay, has eleven stripes.
Besides, the update from the promoters was that the $60 million was neither a deposit for the phone nor an acceptance of the offer to purchase the mobile device. It was paid just to hold a place in line on the queue of desperation. So, Eric went to China.
There is the issue of Trump’s family's World Financial Liberty investing in Pakistan, underwriting the mineral wealth of that country through their specially owned coin for the purpose. Trump, the pirate of the Caribbean, has raided the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and seized their most priced sovereign patrimony, oil!
He then arrogated to himself all the financial value deriving from the sale of over one hundred million barrels of their heavy hydrocarbons and deposited it in a Qatar-domiciled banking account, ostensibly as the only signatory.
The Board of Peace is the apogee of the scamming of custom from the entire globe. Countries are expected to pay $1bn into Trump’s personal account to join. He just happens to be the life chairman of the board without a board!
President DJT and his inner circle have finally figured it out. No politician can ever survive a single scandal, as Nixon’s Watergate crisis lends adequate testimony. However, Trump knows too that political scandals are facets of a peripatetic societal mind that has no capability of focus nor the residuality of retention.
So, to succeed in the trough of graft, a politician must have a profusion of scandals, so many of them all at once such that they would eventually overwhelm the system’s capacity to cope. Some scandals should be contrived only to protect other scandals. Others, as momentary contraptions, are instinctually diversionary. Relentlessly chased by the indefatigable ghost of Epstein, some of these scandals are so corrupt and obfuscatory, they invoke the holy grail of all scandals.
They start wars. And for the tenderness of society’s collective brain and its social media-fed instincts, marinated on toxic cocktails of psyop narratives of war, these wars must have a character of permanency. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine, it doesn’t matter. Iran, here we come! Or is it Cuba?
No doubt, this American political camel is burdened with too many scandalous straws. One last straw is destined to tip the scale and break its back. The question always remains: Which one will it be?
The man who had a painted glass plaque mounted on chestnut wood in the Oval Office must not be forgotten. President Truman’s inscription boldly pronounced that "the buck stops here". A brave president indeed! In the parsimonious allure of his trepidations for politicians and their ability to deprave political systems for self-aggrandisement, he declared without compunction…
“No man can get rich in politics unless he is a crook!”
* Amb Bheki Gila Esq is a Barrister-at-Law.
** The views expressed here do not reflect those of the Sunday Independent, Independent Media, or IOL.