TRUMP PULLS A ZUMA
In the US, the past week felt like something shifted: Donald Trump doesn’t seem invincible anymore
Nineteen years ago I reported on the US for SA’S biggest newspaper, the Sunday Times. I was an absolute failure at my job.
You see, we wrote about scandal then and now as if it was invented, refined and implemented in Africa. We write about the “big man of Africa” or the “kleptocratic leader” of some country. When I reported on then US president George W Bush, or then UK prime minister Tony Blair, I didn’t stop to remind myself that the two were a war-thirsty pair who ratcheted up the rhetoric to attack Afghanistan and Iraq without any evidence whatsoever that those countries were responsible for the 9/11 attacks.
They just wanted blood.
So, looking at the US political scene this week, I was reminded of Jacob Zuma. Remember how, back in 2008/2009, our former president and his cronies disbanded the Scorpions investigative unit so that Zuma would not land in jail? We were all outraged.
Well, the president of the US did pretty much the same thing last week. Yet very few are jumping up and down in indignation. The entire thing is normal. He is happily in power.
In case you missed it, last Saturday US President Donald Trump fired Geoffrey Berman, the New York prosecutor whose office put Trump’s former personal lawyer behind bars and is now investigating his current lawyer, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani. The Trump move was a classic banana republic manoeuvre. Seriously, who would purge the prosecutorial wing of a working democracy while it investigates said leader?
It was also embarrassingly amateurish. First, on Friday evening attorney general William Barr announced that Berman had resigned. Then he announced that a Trump golf buddy would replace Berman. Berman said he had not resigned. Barr then told Berman that the president had fired him. Trump then told reporters on Saturday that no, he was not involved. Barr then climbed down and said the
Trump golf buddy would not be replacing the prosecutor.
Was this obstruction of justice by the Trump administration? Of course it was. Just like Zuma did not want the Scorpions investigating him back in the 2000s, Trump doesn’t want Berman investigating him and his lawyer. John Bolton, Trump’s fired national security adviser, said in an interview on Saturday that Trump told Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that he would intervene in a New York investigation of a state-owned Turkish bank.
“It did feel like obstruction of justice to me,” Bolton said.
There you have it. So, how is
Trump doing and does he have a chance at retaining the presidency? Most polling shows Trump lagging behind former vice-president Joe Biden in the presidential race. Yet many of us remember what happened with the Brexit vote in the UK, for example, and with Trump’s own 2016 presidential run. The polls got it horribly wrong.
Yet, even for sceptics like me, last Saturday looked a lot like the real estate bully from New York was a man who was losing. Trump’s firing of Berman was outrageous enough, but it came on a very bad day. Earlier on Trump had suffered a bloody nose when a federal judge denied him a restraining order to block the release of Bolton’s book, The Room Where It Happened.
Trump then travelled to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where his campaign team had promised a huge rally after months of quiet on the campaign trail. It was a damp squib. The crowd was far smaller than expected and Trump gave a speech that was disjointed, rambling and lacked focus. Trump’s Saturday troubles ended a week in which he had suffered two Supreme Court losses.
Trump has been outmanoeuvred on the world stage as China and Russia have toyed with him. He has maintained popularity at home but this past week felt like something had shifted. He has some time to go to the November election, but Trump doesn’t seem invincible anymore.
That doesn’t really matter, though. What matters is the truth: the US is run by an insecure little man who is undermining its institutions and turning it into the laughing stock of the world. It’s a tragedy.
Who would purge the prosecutorial wing of a working democracy while it investigates said leader?