Zuma and Trump: peers with no respect for their oaths
SA seems at long last about to put itself out of its Jacob Zumainduced national misery. Would that the US was about do the same with its own extraordinarily Zuma-oid president, Donald Trump.
From sexual predation — along with ANC president Cyril Ramaphosa, I believe Khwezi, and on the subject of crotchgrabbing, I take Trump’s own word for it — to a predatory contempt for the rule of law and the constitutions of their respective nations, they have so much in common. But not, sadly, the date of their departures from office.
Assuming this week’s market swoon is not a harbinger of things to come for the hot US real economy, I’ll wager Trump is going to be tweeting from the White House at least to January 2021. His Republicans, as servile towards him as the ANC has been towards Zuma, will probably keep Congress in November, thanks to full employment, rising wages and the ineptitude of the Democratic opposition. So long as the Republicans have the House of Representatives, impeachment is out.
Both men owe debts to dodgy strangers, one of whom they share: Vladimir Putin. Had the Russian nuclear deal gone as planned, Zuma and his cronies would probably be in clover for the rest of their days. We cannot say for sure that Putin’s meddling was decisive in throwing the 2016 election to Trump, but the former KGB man certainly had his cyberthieves and agitprop artists giving it their best shot.
On the social media front, Zuma’s help came from another set of foreign friends, the Guptas, and the lizards they retained at Bell Pottinger to fuel a racially charged meme: the thieving Zuptacrats were really the good guys, battling white monopoly capital on behalf of the dispossessed.
Stoking racial hate is a Trump speciality, too. He uses bigotry to rev up his base, constantly giving his fans permission, even encouragement, to join him in fear and loathing for people of colour. From his crusade to prove that Barack Obama was not born in the US, to his equivocation about neo-Nazis and Klansmen, to his scatological references to African countries, the record is beyond contest.
If Zuma was gatvol with “clever blacks”, Trump is constantly reassuring his supporters that he has no time for clever whites (other than the cleverest and stablest of them all, himself). He is champion of the stupid kind.
For the two leaders, the line between what belongs to them and what belongs to the public is fuzzy indeed.
Zuma had no qualms about using public funds for his private home at Nkandla. Trump bills the US taxpayer for outings to his own golf courses and his stays at Mar-a-Lago, his Palm Beach palace and private club, membership fees for which he jacked up as soon as he was elected. He has stated for the record that conflict of interest laws to prevent officials using office for personal gain do not apply to him as president.
Zuma would like Trump’s infrastructure plan now taking shape: public subsidies for private investors to cherry pick projects from which they can extract monopoly rents in the form of bloated user fees. Billionaire economic empowerment, in other words.
But it is in their machinations to save their respective hides from the law that Zuma and Trump are full peers in chutzpah and lack of respect for the oaths they took when they were sworn in. Zuma’s efforts to create a state that would let him get away with anything have failed.
Trump is still trying — using Fox News, his very own ANN7 — and his army of Jimmy Manyis, like Tony Leon’s former speechwriter Joel Pollak, to convince his people there’s a secret cabal in the justice department that’s out to get him.