Capitol attack – Blood and Porridge

June 14, 2026June 15, 2026

How low will you go?

When The Simpsons was the greatest thing on television a long – a very long – time ago, I remember a 1999 episode, They Saved Lisa’s Brain, that began with a contest being held in Springfield and broadcast live on TV called How Low Will You Go? According to the entry about it on the WikiSimpsons site, How Low Will You Go? was ‘sponsored by Grandma Plopwell’s Pudding’ and its winner ‘would be the person who did the stupidest thing on the stage.’ Contestants included Bart Simpson eating ‘everything that was thrown at him’, Homer Simpson wearing ‘a suit made of popcorn kernels’ and singing a song called Kernel Knowledge, and Moe Szyslak ‘dressed in a sailor suit with a giant lollipop.’

When I saw the episode more than a quarter-century ago, I remember reacting to this indictment of how people are humiliated and degraded by TV and its promises of instant celebrity by thinking: Wow, that is pretty low! Of course, I didn’t know it at the time, but I hadn’t seen anything yet. In the decades since, TV – often of the ‘reality’ variety – has induced folk to do far worse things and make far bigger dicks of themselves on camera, to the point where cavorting around in a suit made of popcorn kernels actually seems quite highbrow in comparison.

Anyway, I feel like How Low Will You Go? has now become a TV series that’s in the middle of its second season. Each season lasts for four years and takes place in the White House whenever Donald Trump is the US president. Season one lasted from 2016 to 2020. Season two began in 2024 and is due to end in 2028. That is, if the USA still exists by 2028. Come to think of it, if the world still exists by 2028.

In season one, Trump proved that yes, he could go pretty low. He shamelessly sucked up to Putin. He belittled a war veteran, John McCain, who’d served his country in Vietnam and spent more than five years as a prisoner of war there. (“I like people who weren’t captured!”) He skipped attending an event in honour of American soldiers killed in World War One at France’s Aisne-Marne American Cemetery on the 100^th anniversary of Armistice Day because he couldn’t handle the fact it was raining. He mocked a reporter suffering from congenital joint condition in front of a rally by doing an impersonation of him that an obnoxious kid would do of someone with cerebral palsy.

He suggested injecting bleach as a cure for Covid-19. He describing developing-world nations as ‘shithole countries’. He leched after his own daughter, talking about her ‘breasts, her backside, and what it might be like to have sex with her.’ He told 30,573 lies, according to the Washington Post. Oh, and when he lost the presidential election in 2020, he claimed, baselessly, it’d been ‘rigged’ and incited a mob of his dingbat supporters to attack the US Capitol, where they chanted about hanging Trump’s own vice-president and tried to prevent Joe Biden’s victory in the election being formalised.

The Trump version of How Will You Go?, season one, was a ratings hit. In fact, a sufficient number of Americans thought it was so wonderful that they voted Trump back into the White House in 2024 for a second season. And, so far, season two hasn’t disappointed. How far can the man go this time? Why, far, far lower!

He’s threatened to annex the USA’s next-door neighbour and important ally and trading partner Canada, so that now everyone in Canada hates his guts, won’t visit his country and spend money there, and won’t buy American products like American bourbon. He’s threatened to annex Greenland, which belongs to a country in a military alliance the USA is in, an alliance whose basic doctrine would require all the other member countries to go to war with the USA if he attempted to annex it. Makes sense, yes?

From wikipedia.org / © The White House

He’s shamelessly sucked up to Putin, again. He’s insulted reporters, often female ones – intelligent and independent-minded women are obviously a group he has serious issues with – calling them ‘piggie’ and ‘crooked or stupid’ and ‘corrupt’ with ‘hatred in her eyes’. He’s whinged like a spoilt brat about not receiving a Nobel Peace Prize. He’s fallen asleep in meetings and press conferences after he sneeringly dubbed his presidential predecessor ‘Sleepy Joe’ Biden. He’s relentlessly posted AI crap on his Truth Social platform, including footage of him in a plane dropping gigantic turds on ‘No Kings’ protestors, pictures of himself as Jesus, and images depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes.

He’s also allowed himself to be bounced into a war against Iran by Benjamin Netanyahu, with the result that the Strait of Hormuz, and the maritime route carrying 20 percent of the world’s oil supply, are now blocked. The other day, he claimed his administration and the Iranians were on the brink of agreeing on a peace deal… But as he’s already claimed this about 40 times since the conflict started in February, I’m not going to hold my breath. At least for Trump, it takes folk’s minds off his sizeable presence in the Epstein Files.

To spice things up even further, the producers of season two of How Low Will You Go? have brought in additional cast-members to give Trump a run for his money in going low. Thus, we’ve had Vice President J. D. Vance insulting single women who keep cats and being a malicious prick towards the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, a leader with more courage in his little finger than Vance and Trump have in their entire, make-up-enhanced bodies.

They’ve also introduced the ultra-ridiculous Pete Hegseth, who was Trump’s Secretary of Defence until Hegseth persuaded him to change the title to the more manly and harder-sounding ‘Secretary of War’, and who pees his pants in rage when press photographers take pictures of him from what he considers unflattering angles. At a recent gathering in France commemorating the 82^nd anniversary of the D-Day landings, Hegseth gave a speech condemning European nations for allowing their beaches to be “stormed by different, dangerous ideologies”, i.e., people he considers not sufficiently white enough and Christian enough to be let in. I really don’t know why Hegseth turned up at this event. After all, 82 years ago, his side lost.

Today, June 14^th, we get another episode in How Low Will You Go? It’s Trump’s 80^th birthday and he’s marking it by staging Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) bouts on the South Lawn of the White House. The Las Vegas-based UFC organises ‘mixed martial-arts’ combat – basically, violent ‘anything-goes’ scraps – inside cages. So, the seat of the American presidency is about to host cage fights. That really resonates with the dignity of the place and those who’ve lived there in the past, one-time holders of the USA’s highest office like Abraham Lincoln, Teddy and Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy. If Honest Abe, FDR, JFK and the rest are watching this from the clouds, they’ll be doing so between their fingers.

What’s been installed for those UFC bouts consists of an enclosed octagonal ring with a huge, claw-like superstructure built over it with clusters of lights and big TV screens attached. The ring is emblazoned with the names of sponsors like Bud Light, Toyo Tires and Pit Boss Grills. And, inevitably, the web address crypto.com features prominently too.

It makes me think of the 1986 movie Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and the hemispherical gladiatorial arena where Max and Blaster had to fight it out with chainsaws and sledgehammers. Trump’s spectacle at the White House sounds just as dystopian – though at least in the Mad Max movie, the dictator presiding over things was played by Tina Turner. I’d have her as my dystopian overlord rather than the revolting, decaying Trump any day of the week.

From wikipedia.org / © Warner Bros / Kennedy Miller Productions

Oh well, I suppose there’s one silver lining to this. Trump’s crass preoccupation with having UFC fighters slug it out on his lawn has at least diverted his attention from the Football World Cup, which kicked off in Canada, Mexico and the USA a few days ago. He hasn’t tried to insert himself into that, so far. I was particularly worried he’d turn up at yesterday’s match between Scotland and Haiti in Boston, since he loves talking about his Scottish roots – his mother hailed from the Isle of Lewis – and since he hates Haitians. (During the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, both he and Vance yet again showed how low they’d go by lying about Haitian immigrants in Ohio eating people’s domestic pets.) If he’d shown his orange face at the match, I think I would have found myself wanting Haiti to win, just to sicken him.*

*Trump didn’t appear, I was able to support Scotland as normal and Scotland won, just about. Phew.

November 14, 2025

Beeb afraid… Beeb very afraid…

From pixabay.com / © TheOtherKev

“With the right, it’s always projection.” That’s a sentiment I’ve frequently heard. In other words, right-wingers love to accuse other people of sins that they’re guilty of perpetrating themselves.

For example, the Trump regime has been cracking down on pro-Palestinian protests in American universities, and threatening foreign students involved with deportation, in the name of ‘combatting antisemitism’. But Trump has readily dog-whistled about George Soros conspiracy fantasies; has sat down to dinner with white supremacist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes; and claimed that the neo-Nazi Unite the Right movement that marched through Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 chanting ‘Jews will not replace us’ contained among its number some ‘very fine people’.

Elsewhere, Trump’s evangelical-Christian support is always eager to label gay and trans people as a threat to children. Yet by the end of October this year, the journalist Evan Hurst claimed to be following 188 news stories in 2025 whereby “Christian pastors / youth group leaders / priests / Christian school teachers, etc.,… had been accused / caught / arrested for / convicted of abusing kids in some way.” Incidentally, Trump has been mysteriously reluctant to release the files about his former friend, the financier, paedophile and human trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Some believe this is because Trump features damningly in those files himself.

However, the current kerfuffle between Trump and the British Broadcasting Corporation, the BBC, aka ‘the Beeb’, is surely the most blatant case of the kettle calling the pot black. The BBC is in hot water because of an episode of its current-affairs programme Panorama, broadcast last year. It contained a clip of Trump addressing his supporters in Washington DC on January 6^th, 2021 – a crowd that subsequently became a mob and attacked the US Capitol, wanting to prevent Electoral College votes being counted and Joe Biden being confirmed as the new president. Except that Panorama didn’t show one clip as insinuated, but two clips, from moments in Trump’s speech nearly an hour apart. By splicing them together, it’s claimed, the BBC distorted his message and made him sound like he was inciting the crowd to violence.

Well, later, that crowd did behave violently. But Panorama’s critics seem to imply this had nothing to do with Trump. Oh no, sir. No siree.

According to Trump, the BBC “actually changed my January 6 speech, which was a beautiful speech, which was a very calming speech, and they made it sound radical.” The corporation had ‘defrauded the public’. It had lied. Thus, it was Trump’s ‘obligation’ to take legal action against the network and sue them for… one billion dollars.

It’s hilarious to see Trump lose his rag and accuse someone else of lying because, when it comes to telling lies, Trump is the Master of Mendacity, the Pharaoh of Falsehood, the Divinity of Dishonesty, the Deity of Deceit. The Washington Post catalogues him making ‘30,573 false or misleading claims’ during his first presidency alone. By my calculations, if somebody had successfully sued him for a billion dollars for every ‘porkie pie’ he told between 2016 and 2020, he’d have had to shell out a sum of money in 14 digits.

No doubt the BBC was guilty of sloppy, even vindictive (if you can be that towards Trump) journalism with the Panorama episode. But Trump did instigate the Capitol riot. He was impeached for it a week later and would have been convicted if two-thirds of the Senate had voted for it the following month. As it was, a majority of senators voted for his conviction, by 57 to 43, with seven Republican senators voting for it alongside the Democrats. And Wikipedia’s account of the aftermath of the Capitol riot is a reminder of the revulsion just about everyone who wasn’t a diehard Trump supporter felt at the time – no matter how much these days Trump tries to rewrite history about what happened.

© CBS News

His culpability was obvious before January 6^th too. The mob was present in Washington DC that day because of Trump’s relentless lies about the 2020 US presidential election being ‘stolen’ from him. The journalist Howard Goodall has compiled the messages he sent out to his followers in the run-up to the gathering, including: “Big protest in D.C. on January 6^th. Be there, will be wild…!” “We will never give up. We will never concede…” “We’re going to fight like hell. If you don’t fight, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” If the Trump-BBC spat does end up in court, I’d love to hear his line of argument. “The BBC twisted the truth about me inciting a bad thing that I really did incite.”

One great irony is that Trump has massively benefited from news companies editing his speeches, in that they usually pick out the bits where he sounds vaguely coherent and sane and ignore the lengthy stretches that suggest his brain is rapidly putrefying into a dollop of rancid mush.

For example, this is him havering to the American Business Forum in Miami on November 5^th, seemingly unaware of the difference between South Africa and South America: “For generations. Miami has been a haven for those fleeing communist tyranny in South Africa. I mean, if you take a look at what’s going on in parts of South Africa, look at South Africa, what’s going on. Look at South America, what’s going on. You know, I’m not going to — we have a G20 meeting in South Africa. South Africa shouldn’t even be in the Gs anymore because what’s happened there is bad. I’m not going. I told them, I’m not going. I’m not going to represent our country there. It shouldn’t be there. Take a look at what’s happening in different parts of South America….”

The furore erupted when right-wing British newspaper the Daily Telegraph reported on a leaked memo by Michael Prescott, a one-time political editor for another right-wing British newspaper the Sunday Times and, until recently, an advisor to the BBC’s Editorial Standards and Guidelines Board. Prescott’s memo raised ‘concerns’ about the BBC’s impartiality and cited Panorama’s treatment of the January 6^th speech as an example. In the ensuing ruckus, the BBC’s director general Tim Davie and its chief executive Deborah Furness resigned.

It’s rich of the Telegraph to bang on about the BBC’s disingenuity too. According to independent reporter Sam Bright, “in 2025 alone, the paper has been forced to publish over 100 corrections, clarifications, and formal regulatory apologies.” Meanwhile, other right-wing British newspapers soon joined the anti-BBC feeding frenzy, including the Sun (‘BEEB’S BILLION DOLLAR BUNGLE’) and the Times (‘BBC IS TOLD: SAY SORRY OR TRUMP WILL SUE FOR $1BN’). The Sun and the Times’ gaffer is Rupert Murdoch, whose Fox News had to pay 785.5 million dollars in a settlement to Dominion Voting Systems in 2023. This was after Murdoch’s network tried to propagate Trump’s big election lie by accusing Dominion’s voting machines of being rigged to steal the 2020 election from him.

Britain’s right-wing newspapers, of course, are always delighted to see the BBC in trouble. They hate the corporation both out of principle – its publicly-funded existence is an affront to their hardline capitalist ethos – and because of the major competition the BBC’s news operation gives them. No wonder they’re in seventh heaven about Trump bearing down on the Beeb with the threat of a billion-dollar lawsuit.

I also expect that, when the next British general election approaches, the BBC factor will play a part in those newspapers distancing themselves from the beleaguered Conservative Party, whom they’ve traditionally supported. Instead, they’ll swing behind the hard-right Reform party, led by Nigel Farage, who coincidentally is Trump’s number one cheerleader in Britain. If he gets into power, Farage is likely to be as ruthless with the BBC as Trump has been cutting funding for public broadcasting in the USA. No doubt the Telegraph, the Sun and co. see Farage as their best bet for getting rid of their hated rival.

From wikipedia.org / © House of Commons / Laurie Noble

Though its drama, comedy and documentary TV shows were a big influence on me during my formative years, and though it’s Trump who’s persecuting them, I have to admit I find it hard to summon much sympathy for the BBC these days. Its news reporting generally pisses me off for a number of reasons: its much-vaunted ‘impartiality’ (which too often feels like a lily-livered way of not causing offence), its unthinking support of the British establishment and, more recently, its kowtowing to right-wing politicians and opinion-formers.

The news stories on its website often give oxygen to right-wing cranks and extremists – climate-change deniers, anarcho-capitalists, bigots, Trump himself – who are allowed to express their opinions so long as someone else is quoted giving an opposing view. This approach lets the BBC avoid upsetting the cranks and extremists whilst parroting its ‘impartiality’ principle. But as the saying goes, when a journalist finds him or herself in a room with two people arguing about whether or not it’s raining outside, it’s not his or her job to simply write down what both are claiming. The journalist should look out of the window and determine if it is raining or not.

Simultaneously, the BBC is depressingly pro-British establishment. This is most clearly evidenced by the inordinate coverage it devotes to the Royal Family every time one of them dies. Its over-the-top reporting of Prince Philip’s death in 2021 and its ‘perceived attempt to manufacture a largely absent national grief’ drew a record-breaking number of complaints: over 100,000.

Meanwhile, it gives short shrift to anyone threatening to rock that establishment. These include Britain’s trade union movement (one nadir was its coverage of the ‘Battle of Orgreave’ during the Miners’ Strike in 1984, when by reversing footage it suggested the strikers had thrown missiles first and then the police attacked them, when the events had been the other way around); supporters of Scottish independence (during the run-up to the Scottish independence referendum in 2014, the former BBC journalist Paul Mason remarked, “Not since Iraq have I seen BBC News working at propaganda strength like this. So glad I’m out of there“); and left-wing Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn (when BBC journalist Laura Kuenssberg interviewed Corbyn in 2017, the interview was doctored to make it sound like he wouldn’t approve of police using shoot-to-kill tactics to deal with terrorists mounting a 2015 Paris / Bataclan-style attack in Britain).

And, presumably fearful of the future, the BBC has spent recent years grovelling to the right in the hope that it’ll curry favour with them. It never does. Grovelling to bullies simply results in them coming back to inflict more pain on you.

People have lost count of how many times Nigel Farage has been on the Beeb’s flagship political discussion show Question Time, but as of May 2024 it was put at 36. Meanwhile, the BBC’s news agenda slavishly follows that set by the country’s predominantly right-wing press – starting with the round-up of the newspapers on its breakfast-time shows, where viewers are exposed to whatever grievances the likes of the Daily Mail and Daily Express are screaming about that morning. If the corporation had a proper grasp of impartiality (and understood that newspapers with a physical presence on the newsstand aren’t people’s only sources of news), it’d try and balance those headlines with ones from more left-wing, online publications like the Byline Times and Novara Media.

But obviously, I find the BBC’s news coverage more palatable than the biased and often bilious garbage served up by the Mail, Express, Sun and Telegraph.

Interestingly – and I think this is something people in England don’t appreciate – the BBC is possibly the last institution that encourages people in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to feel ‘British’. It’s still present in most people’s homes across the four nations of the United Kingdom. It still gives them some sense of shared British community through its news programmes and its more popular entertainment shows like The Great British Bake-Off. Should the BBC disappear, I don’t see what else, culturally and in the long term, will act as the glue holding the UK together. (Certainly not the family of Mr. Andrew Mountbatten Windsor.) How ironic if the supposed super-British patriot Nigel Farage destroys this glue by abolishing the BBC or underfunding it to the point of irrelevancy.

That is, of course, if Trump doesn’t bankrupt it first.

From pixabay.com / © Ralf Genge

February 4, 2025

You won’t ever be happy

From pixabay.com / © clecaux

It’s been two weeks since Donald Trump’s inauguration as 47^th president of the United States. For the 49.8 percent of Americans who voted in November 2024’s presidential election and voted for him, his previous four-year stint as 45^th president obviously wasn’t enough.

Already those two weeks feel like two decades. I live in Singapore, a long way away from Trump’s USA, and yet his orange visage assails me non-stop, smirking and scowling out of photos in the news websites and social media accounts I peruse. I feel sorry for the poor folk who can’t stand the sight of him but have to live within the same country-borders as him.

It’s been relentless. One moment he’s pardoning the 1600-odd dingbats who attacked the US Capitol on January 6^th, 2021, including 600 who were charged with attacking or impeding law-enforcement officers, and including the lunatic shaman-guy in the buffalo horns who reacted to his pardon by posting on Twitter, “Now I am gonna by some motha f**kin guns!” The next moment he’s pulling the USA out of the Paris climate agreement (again) and halting Joe Biden’s Green New Deal – much to the delight, I’m sure, of the Chinese government, whom he blames for pushing the ‘hoax’ of man-made climate change. They’ll now seize the opportunity to establish their country as the world’s renewable-energy superpower.

And the next moment again he’s halting all American foreign aid, giving Elon Musk’s ‘Department of Governmental Efficiency’ (DOGE) free rein to destroy the US Agency for International Development (USAID), or as Musk calls it, ‘a viper’s nest of radical left-Marxists who hate America’. Again, I’m sure the Chinese government is cheering. As the US’s disease-prevention, food security, water security, education, etc., programmes in the Global South and elsewhere grind to a halt, they’ll swoop in and replace them, thus greatly extending China’s global soft power and influence.

What else? Trump’s pulled the US out of the World Health Organisation (WHO) – obviously, when there’s a deadly global pandemic, he doesn’t want medical experts interfering in how he runs his country and warning him that his proposed ‘inject yourself with bleach’ cure isn’t a good idea. He’s banned all Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programmes in the belief that important jobs must be left to straight, fully-abled white men, who are inherently smarter than everyone else. Why, even before the bodies of those killed in January 29^th’s mid-air collision at Washington DC were cold, Trump raged that DEI policies were responsible for the tragedy.

He’s renamed the Gulf of Mexico ‘the Gulf of America’. (What next? One wag speculated on social media that he might rename the Oxford comma ‘the Comma of America’.) He’s tried to bully Denmark into handing over Greenland to him, as part of his expand-the-American-Empire project (no doubt inspired by his buddy Putin’s expand-the-Russian-Empire project). And he’s also tried to bully Mexico and Canada, by threatening to slap tariffs on their goods. I’m not a big fan of Pierre Trudeau, but his riposte to Trump’s blustering bollocks showed he has more class and statesmanship in the tip of his little finger than Trump has in his whole, gross body.

From pixabay.com / © StockSnap

However, I’m sure that for tens of millions of Trump’s supporters, this is music to their ears. They must feel like they’re in heaven. Thanks to the antics of their orange hero, they’re now owning the libtards. They’re bathing in libtard tears. They’re loving the smell of napalmed libtards in the morning. They’re achieving their number-one objective, which is to cause maximum distress to those libtard snowflakes who want to deny them their constitutional right to stockpile huge quantities of military assault rifles, and their right to go ‘rolling coal’ in their modified diesel-engine trucks, and their right to grab women by the pussy without suffering consequences, and their right to live in neighbourhoods with zero numbers of people of colour, and so on. They’re all on Twitter, or ‘X’ as Musk insists on calling it, yeehawing their joy in their echo-chambers of MAGA-ites, incels, neo-Nazis and Russian bots at how President Trump is blasting those libtard wusses with both barrels.

Well, to the vast majority of Trump’s supporters – i.e., those not rich enough to qualify as being in the top 10 percent who own half the nation’s wealth – I have some bad news. You won’t ever be happy.

Firstly, your lives aren’t going to improve materially. The involvement in Trump’s project of Elon Musk, who’s the world’s richest human being and whose right arm had a Dr Strangelove-style tendency to slip into troubling, sloping salutes at the inauguration, should be a warning of that. So too should the prominent places given at that inauguration to Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg. Big tax-cuts are coming for Trump’s wealthy and super-wealthy friends. A large part of the bill for those will be shifted onto the working and middle-classes, for example, through the extra they’ll have to pay for goods when Trump starts imposing his beloved tariffs.

Some of these tax-cuts will also be financed through the axing of government services, which Musk is doing in his new, DOGE-eat-dog world right now. There’s always much whinging about how much is removed from your pay-packet and sent off to fund distant government departments. But when departments overseeing such things as social security, medical care, education, tax refunds, disease control, environmental protection, disaster relief and so on receive the chop, and the effects of their loss are felt, I suspect people’s tunes will change.

Incidentally, it’s ironic that far-right-wing commentators, influencers and social-media grifters have for years belched out claims that the world’s governments are secretly controlled by liberal-minded billionaires like Bill Gates or George Soros. They’ve also indulged in antisemitic dog-whistling by suggesting that billionaire banking family the Rothschilds are pulling the levers. (See, for instance, a 2023 complaint by the Board of Deputies of British Jews to GB News about their presenter and conspiracy fantasist Neil Oliver referencing the antisemitic, Rothschild-accusing document Silent Weapons for Silent Wars during one of his diatribes about impending ‘one-world government’.) Yet here we have a billionaire who, unelected and in plain sight, is heavily financing, influencing and manipulating an elected government for his own benefit. And there’s not a peep out of them.

From unsplash.com / © Larissa Avononmadegbe

Musk has even got access to classified US treasury files, which are full of confidential data about citizens’ social security and Medicare payment systems. You’d think this violation of people’s private information would give right-wing conspiracy nuts the heebie-geebies. But no, they’ve been strangely quiet. Maybe Musk’s salute at the inauguration did it. He showed these guys that they didn’t have to worry – he’s the type of billionaire they’d want to have controlling their government.

But returning to Trump, I don’t see how his antics are going to improve life for the average citizen who voted for him. If he carries out his witless threats to impose tariffs, he’ll drive up prices. Meanwhile, his belief that, conveniently, climate change is just a sham will no doubt see the American economy take a severe battering in the years ahead as the country itself takes a battering from increasingly inclement weather. Imagine what home-insurance bills will be like after a good chunk of Florida tips into the Atlantic Ocean.

Not that I think his supporters will be loudly belly-aching about their lives continuing to be shit, or being even shitter than they were previously. A lot of them will be conditioned by sunk-cost fallacy and keep quiet – having invested so much time and energy in backing Trump and his MAGA movement, they’ll be reluctant to admit they were wrong. Also, Trump now has X, Facebook, Instagram, Threads and, most recently, Tik Tok singing his praises. He also has newspapers like Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post and Patrick Soon-Shiong’s Los Angeles Times kowtowing and kissing his ring. The bulk of the American media will spend the next four years assuring the public they’ve never had it so good, when in all probability they’ve never had it so bad.

And that’s not all, Trump supporters. Even in the unlikely case of your circumstances getting better, you still won’t ever be happy. Trump and his lackeys won’t allow you to be happy. To illustrate what I mean, you only have to look at Britain and the nearest institution Britain has to Trumpism – that toxic far-right-wing newspaper the Daily Mail. Paul Dacre, its former editor and now the editor-in-chief of its publisher DMG Media, once remarked that the perfect Daily Mail story was one that (1) confirmed its readers’ worst fears and (2) gave them someone to blame for it. You can expect something similar in the US over the next few years. (Maybe forever, if Trump can change the constitution so that it resembles that of Putin’s Russia, and politicians who might oppose him in future elections start falling to their deaths out of windows.)

Everything that goes wrong will be the fault of immigrants eating people’s pets, or environmentalists not pumping enough water to put out wildfires, or Democrats controlling the weather, or Jewish space-lasers, or deadly aircraft-destroying DEI programmes. Even when things aren’t going wrong, Trump will still dial up the panic, make it look like crises are happening, and blame immigrants, liberals, working mothers, people of colour, etc. That’s because he can’t afford to let his base relax and simply get on with their lives. To ensure their ongoing support, he has to keep them in a constant state of anxiety and in constant readiness to lash out about it. They’re to be riled up, permanently.

So, Trump people, I’m sorry, but you won’t ever be happy. As someone once put it: “Hell is getting what you think it is you want.”

January 14, 2021January 15, 2021

Trump-town riots

© CBS News

“It’s a disgrace, there’s never been anything like that. You could take third-world countries, just take a look, take third-world countries. Their elections are more honest than what we’ve been going through in this country. It’s a disgrace.”

So spoke President, now almost Ex-President, Donald Trump at a rally at Washington DC on January 6^th. This was before the rally’s attendees launched an assault on the US Capitol while members of Congress were meeting there to certify Joe Biden becoming the 46^th president and Trump’s successor.

Bravely, Trump used the pronoun ‘we’, which normally means ‘me’ as well as ‘you’, when he declared: “…we’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue… and we’re going to the Capitol…” Then, bravely, he didn’t accompany his supporters when they marched off to confront and fight their way past the Capitol’s police force (many of whom, as it happened, were suspiciously reluctant to do their jobs). Instead, bravely, Trump headed back to the White House where, bravely, he watched the ensuing carnage on TV.

In his speech, Trump claimed that November 2020’s presidential election, when Joe Biden won 72 more electoral college seats and 7,250,000 more votes than he did, and which everybody from the Supreme Court to the Department of Justice – not to mention the judges who chucked out 60-odd lawsuits filed by Trump in protest – agreed had been held fairly, was even more fraudulent than an election held in a third-world country. Even more!

I guess I should credit Trump for using the term ‘third-world countries’, which is an improvement on his previous term for less-well-off parts of the planet, ‘shithole countries’. I doubt, though, if he’ll ever evolve to the point where he refers to them as ‘developing-world countries’, or even less-patronising terms like ‘low-and-lower-middle-income countries’, or ‘the global south’, or ‘the Majority World’.

As somebody who’s spent much time living in (what I’ll call) low-and-lower-middle-income countries, I have to say I’ve never seen a spectacle as humiliatingly ridiculous as the one in the Capitol following Trump’s rabble-rousing speech on January 6^th. I’ve lived in North Korea under Kim Jong-Il and Libya under Colonel Ghaddafi, dictators whose perpetual self-aggrandisement led to some ludicrous sights indeed. But nothing I saw in those places compares to last week’s scenes, where American politicians fled from their chambers while doors buckled, windows imploded and police and secret-service officers were pushed back by an inexorable, invading tide of white supremacists, Nazis, militiamen, crackpot conspiracists and MAGA nutjobs.

It resembled the start of a zombie-apocalypse movie – the bit where a live TV broadcast, announcing the emergency and urging calm, is interrupted by the studio staff looking into the lobby and screaming off-camera, “They’re here! They’re here!” Though this wasn’t so much Dawn of the Dead as QAnon of the Dead.

And during my time in what Trump thinks of as ‘shithole countries’, I’ve never seen performers from such a theatre of the absurd as those who were centre stage in the Capitol when, temporarily, the mob occupied it. The QAnon-shaman guy with the buffalo furs and horns and the painted face, resembling the figure on the cover of the 1993 Jamiroquai album Emergency on Planet Earth after it’d spent a night sleeping in a skip. The other guy with the furs, plus glasses and a dead beaver on his head, looking like the world’s shittest Davie Crockett. The guy in the bobbled ‘Trump’ hat who walked off with Nancy Pelosi’s lectern, now under arrest and subject to a thousand jokes on social media about when he’ll ‘take the stand’. The guy with the Santa Claus beard and the ‘Camp Auschwitz’ T-shirt, whom one right-wing idiot later tried to deflect criticism from on social media by suggesting he might actually be an ‘Auschwitz survivor’… Hold on, though. Someone celebrating Auschwitz in 2021? That’s not absurd. That’s frightening.

Indeed, after the initial absurdities broadcast on the initial news reports, there came more frightening accounts of what’d happened. A police officer died of injuries sustained while being bludgeoned by a fire extinguisher. Another officer, a black man, had to offer himself as bait and lure a racist mob away from the senate entrance, so that those inside got a few extra minutes to evacuate. (While these things were happening, other officers, clearly sympathetic to the mob’s intent, were dismantling barriers to let them pass and posing for selfies with them.) Journalists were attacked. A makeshift noose was strung up outside. Masked figures roamed around carrying zip-tie handcuffs, apparently planning to take hostages.

Meanwhile, there was the jaw-dropping contemptibility of Republican politicians such as Ted Cruz, the Texan cowpat, and Josh Hawley, a man who physically and spiritually resembles Miguel Ferrer’s scumbag executive in Robocop (1987). Even after the insurrection, they kept on parroting Trump’s honking-mad claims about election fraud and they voted against Biden’s certification. Obviously, this is because they want to secure the support of Trump’s deranged base when they launch their own bids to become president in 2024. With Cruz and Hawley, it’s not so much ‘we the people’ as ‘me the people’.

I suppose I should react to this with schadenfreude. The USA has a long history of promoting revolutions and insurrections in other countries. The most notorious of many examples were the overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, which the USA and its little sidekick the UK orchestrated in 1953 (and which begat the Shah of Iran, which begat the 1979 revolution, which begat the Ayatollah, which begat the Iran we know and fear today), and the 1973 coup d’état it engineered against President Salvador Allende that resulted in the murderous, fascistic rule of General Pinochet. Now it’s embarrassingly fallen prey to an attempted coup of its own.

Still, all the sanctimonious blather about the USA being the mother of democracy and the shining light for other nations to follow, often propagated by Hollywood movies, does worm its way into your consciousness no matter how hard you try to resist. So although the idea of American democratic righteousness is more myth and propaganda than reality, seeing its political heart get trashed by Jamiroquai-shaman guy, beaver-on-head guy, lectern-guy, etc., was rather sad.

From twitter.com / schwarzenegger

Incidentally, if the notion that the USA is the great champion of democracy is cheesy guff, it was appropriate that a few days later Arnold Schwarzenegger, one of cinema’s greatest proponents of cheesy (though enjoyable) guff, went viral in a video in which he praised American democracy. Arnie even likened its resilience to the sword of Conan the Barbarian. The sword’s blade, he explained, becomes stronger the more it’s tempered by punishment. (Sorry, Arnie, but I seem to remember Conan’s mantra being to ‘crush your enemies, see them driven before you and hear the lamentations of their women’. Which doesn’t sound terribly democratic to me.)

But returning to the topic of low-and-lower-middle-income countries… From 1999 to 2001 I worked in Ethiopia. When I arrived there, most Ethiopians’ experience of the outside world was via an antiquated TV set kept in a wooden cabinet in the neighbourhood coffee shop or bar, which gave them access to two terrestrial channels. The channels’ output seemed to consist mainly of clips of traditional Ethiopian dancing, English football matches that’d taken place three weeks earlier, and reruns of Jake and the Fatman (1987-92).

Within two years, however, satellite TV had arrived with a vengeance. Suddenly, those same people were being exposed daily to dozens, if not hundreds of channels crammed with glossy adverts and pop videos dripping with opulence – fancy cars, penthouses, jewellery, designer clothes. It was all phoney nonsense, of course. Most people in other countries didn’t live like that. But how was your average Ethiopian expected to know? And how, I wondered, would this impact on the psychology of a people whose country was then, and still is today, pretty impoverished? (In 2018 its GDP per capita was ranked 167^th in the world.)

As it turned out, I should have been more worried about the Americans and how they’d cope with rapid advances in communications technology and especially with the sudden arrival of social media. For now we have vast numbers of Americans taking Trump’s twitter ravings as the gospel truth. Also, vast numbers of them believe the insane drivel that is the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory, whereby Trump is battling a worldwide network of paedophilic, baby-eating Satanists who control everything, especially everything that’s liberal.

Whoever Biden appoints as a successor to Betty DeVos, Trump’s wretched Secretary of Education, will urgently need to promote 21^st century skills like critical thinking and digital literacy in the nation’s schools. Otherwise, thanks to social media and the Internet, the USA will collectively disappear down an extremist rabbit hole or get locked into a far-right echo chamber.

Ironically, Trump, so disdainful of ‘shithole countries’ in Africa and elsewhere, is probably closest in his vanity, bluster and puffed-up preposterousness to some of the infamous dictators who ruled certain African nations after the end of colonialism. I’m thinking of Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko who, while most of his subjects lived in poverty, built a palace that became known as ‘the Versailles of the jungle’, travelled using a fleet of costly Mercedes-Benz motor cars and hired Concorde for shopping trips to France. What Trumpian things to do. I’m also thinking of Uganda’s Idi Amin, described in 1973 by his country’s American ambassador as ‘racist, erratic and unpredictable, brutal, inept, bellicose, irrational, ridiculous and militaristic.’ That sounds like Trump down to a T.

By the way, talk of Idi Amin makes me think of the 2006 movie The Last King of Scotland, based on the 1998 novel by Giles Fodden. In that, a hapless, vain and dim Scotsman, played by James McAvoy, cosies up to Amin, played by Forest Whittaker, at the start of the latter’s career and soon gets more than he bargained for.

Thinking of The Last King of Scotland’s imaginary scenario, I’m somehow reminded of the real-life scenario here:

Anyway, America, one week has passed since the Capitol insurrection. You’ve got just one more week to go before Biden gets inaugurated and the Orange Blob, hopefully, is cast off into powerlessness and obscurity.

You’re halfway out of Crazy Town. Hope you make it. Good luck.