BY PHAKAMISA MAYABA
Who would’ve thought that even in the beer-addled, boisterous haunt that is a certain Karoo shebeen, where the conversation usually alternates between the weekend derby or the poor shot taking pitiful aim at the pool table, everybody would suddenly have his or her two cents about that president-elect.
Everybody, except those who prominently march under one political umbrella or another. They have opinions, but just don’t mention that they said it. One never gets this toeing of the line, the aversion to the media – especially innocuous, inconsequential rags like this one. Anyway …
Trump has won. Come January 2025, we’ll see the uploading of Potus 2.0 — the Donald back in business. With the swing states overwhelmingly in his clutch, the disappointment of the 2020 campaign has become a flex; to gloat about the comeback that some vowed would never see the light of day. At least not if America was still a place of sanity.
To the chagrin of many, Donald Trump has gone from a disgraced former president, all woebegone inside the dock, to counting down the days until Joe Biden will have packed his bags and vacated the White House. Here is a man that just five months ago was found guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records, and paying hush money to a former adult entertainer.
His utterances on where to ‘grab’ women has rendered him a misogynist. His supporters, who stormed the US Capitol Building in an apparent self-coup, saw their leader being written off as a fascist. He talks down at journalists, has been called the new Hitler, and his campaign has seen former president Barack Obama coming out to urge the African-American population to please, brothers, not this guy. But here we are. America has barreled headlong into voting this supposed unpresidential delinquent back into the Oval Office.
The leftist media were certain that Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate, wouldn’t need too much patter; her opponent’s gaffes alone were enough to pave the way to victory. If she stuck to the script, it’d be a piece of cake: a ‘black’ woman, a mulligan, who could redeem America from the bogey of 2016, effectively to keep the Führer as far away from another grip on the Reichstag as possible.
For a while, the spin held. The harder trick was to think you could get away with half-truths in a world where cameras and mics are rigged over the shoulders of the powerful. Soon enough the makeup began to smudge. The race police came out saying she was not really black; she is actually of Indian descent. Still, said the ones who couldn’t ‘fess up to the cock-up, there was hope. Then it began to look like she wasn’t hitting the correct talking points, and it suddenly was all up in the air.
It didn’t help that her messaging on the Israel-Palestine conflict was chopped and reconfigured depending on the number of Muslims or Jews in a particular constituency. In Pennsylvania, Israel’s right to defend itself. In Michigan, what has happened in Gaza was ‘devastating.’ In another era she may have gotten away with it, but with the omniscient social media, it has become impossible to facilitate homogeneous narratives. With the surge in conspiracy theories, there is a legitimate curiosity to hear what’s being said outside of the traditional media sphere.
When ordinary Americans saw the explosions, malnourished children and illegal settlements in Gaza, things went beyond mere politics and tugged at a primal cry to say; This is just not right. As a result, all across America, university campuses went into an uproar. Courtesy of a slew of videos and documentaries exposing the post-October 7 bloodletting, Americans have had to hang their heads in shame (pretty much the same way that apartheid atrocities started to reach the ears of white South Africans in the time of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, leaving them unable to say, ‘we didn’t know’) at the US-backed carnage that’s taking place at that strip of horror. But, in the main, Harris didn’t sound like her administration could bring about an end to the war, let alone a viable long-term solution to the decades-long conflict.
What much of the punditry lamented was her obsession about making a meal of Trump, playing the man instead of scoring on the stuff that counted most to the people.
By the time she brought out the likes of Cardi B, a female rapper notorious for raunchy videos and lyrics steeped in profanity and sex, even a supportive African-American community wasn’t so sure anymore. The tropes and stereotyping had become unpalatable. It seemed what Harris was saying was that a ‘twerking’ (a dance in which there is much shaking of the derriere) celebrity was all it took to garner black support.
Rapper Cardi B at a Kamala Harris rally in Milwaukee. Video: YouTube.
So too her Maimane-like switching of accents to emulate the ‘sisters in the hood.’ In urban parlance, she’d effectively gone from what Malcolm X called a defiant ‘field n****r’ into an obsequious ‘house’ one. From one who seemed attuned to the cotton field black struggle, to one who was dining at the table in the big house with the master. The irony is, of course, that Trump was also in the business of courting the sort of celebrities a more discerning candidate wouldn’t want to be seen with, chief among them Elon Musk. The gamble seems to have paid off, and Musk has now been charged with heading a newly formed Department of Government Efficiency.
As for traditional media, they pretty much stuck to the drill – the left mainly with Harris, the right with Trump. But it was probably the alternative column – which has garnered a big following in recent years – where the real war was won and lost. With 14.5 million followers on Spotify alone, the Joe Rogan Experience is a juggernaut in the independent podcast space. At some point, Rogan invited Harris to an interview, but she allegedly put up so many conditions that he host, put the matter on ice. But Trump said yes, and since that interview was uploaded on 26 October it has been viewed more than 48 million times. A last-minute windfall, as Trump was given a license to address a massive audience on the eve of an election for almost three hours.
Joe Rogan’s internet-shattering interview with Donald Trump. Video: YouTube.
Not unexpectedly, here at home, not many are thrilled that the person who once referred to our continent as a ‘s***hole’ is back on the levers. City Press was livid: ‘A well-known racist, xenophobe, narcissist, misogynist and convicted felon, the world is wondering how the voters settled for him,’ it trumpeted in an editorial. Zwelinzima Vavi, general secretary of the SA Federation of Trade Unions, expressed his concern about how ‘far-right ideologues have won elections or appear to have soared suddenly in popularity’.
But in mitigation, perhaps it can all be chalked up to a campaign slogan that might have flown beneath the radar in our own election a few months ago. ‘Restore and Build’, rallied the Freedom Front Plus. Yes, they are a conservative white party primarily focused on minority interests, but everybody – regardless of race – can see the decay. Many have broken axles on potholes, others have been victims of violent crime. There’s a proliferation of beggars at the intersections, countless more out of a job. Once thriving cities are deteriorating. Our own president is embroiled in his own healthy quota of scandals. Swathes of the population aren’t happy.
In the general election of 29 May, that unhappiness found an outlet. It didn’t matter that the leading party had ‘freed us from the Boers’, that its candidate was a Struggle stalwart or, for that matter, that Madiba once said that his first order of business if he ever got to heaven was to find the nearest branch of the ANC. Fealty had surrendered to necessity. No longer was it a matter of picking sides for loyalty’s sake than picking sides based on how they could help you out of the despondency. It was a selfish vote, but it’s what many felt was needed.
In America, just as in South Africa, it’s good to go for the guy who most looks like you, but sometimes the thing to do is to go for the guy who will best safeguard your interests. To many Americans, it seems, it didn’t matter that he came with orange-blond hair.
FEATURED IMAGE: The ‘sentient naartjie’ at a campaign rally. Image: Gage Skidmore on Flickr.
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This is an edited version of an article that first appeared on Phakamisa Mayaba’s website, eparkeni. Used with permission.