Letter from America with KENNETH MUFUKA
I was fellowshipping with my long-time friends, vanaSamanyika, whose names are self-revealing, Cornelius Sanyanga, a former chairman of Standard Bank, and Sylvester Saburi, a retired pioneer surgeon.
The joke in Masvingo is that mazezuru and vaManyika ruined the country under Robert Mugabe and now they want makaranga to fix it.
Sanyanga turned the argument around on me. “Is Donald Trump a popular president in the US?”
The simple answer is that Trump is a nuisance, a menace to all that is decent on the world stage, what Americans call an outlier and a barbarian in manners and etiquette.
The son of a billionaire, and a New Yorker, he got a double dose of insouciance and behaviour befitting a spoiled brat.
However, after all this has been said, Trump reflects deep seated fears by ordinary Americans brought about by globalisation, secularisation and immigrant hordes unwilling to recast themselves in the American melting pot as the founding fathers had envisaged.
This takes us to another level, as brother Subusiso Moyo would put it.
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In fact, Trump has never lost his basic support from day one. Let us go to the third level.
In fact, as I speak, Trump has gained some support, from his basic 38% support to 45%.
Here is another juicy issue. I belong to a prayer group of hard- working white community leaders.
The group, which includes the sheriff and his senior staff, meets every Friday morning at 6.30 for prayer before dispersing for our various tasks as the Lord has given us.
While Trump got 64% of the South Carolinian electorate, I have never heard anybody in that group confess to having voted for him.
While, therefore, ashamed of his public behaviour, they see no alternative at the moment.
Evangelicals form the most loyal cohort in Trump’s army.
They watched, over the years, as basic Christian values such as marriage between man and woman were abolished by former president Barack Obama without Congressional support.
Abortion on demand, for frivolous reasons like going on vacation, was allowed.
The most frightful development was a huge influx of Latin American immigrants who simply walked across the southern border.
White fear was based on the reality that Latinos brought with them a “quadillo mentality” (acceptance of tyranny) and social welfare values.
American founding fathers saw social welfare help as a last resort, not as an option. White extremists say that under present US laws, food stamps, pre-pregnancy nutrition support, post-pregnancy housing support, and food stamps for families of four earning less than $22 500 — would be attractive to destitute migrants from Latin America.
While white and Afro-births are declining, because Latinos are generally Catholics, their families average five children as opposed to two for whites.
A statistic just released, but not yet confirmed, reveals the prospective that under age 30, people of colour are approximating a 40% figure.
The elites, educated under a regime of politically correct regimen, were not allowed to say these things in public.
I taught my students not even to be caught dreaming aloud saying bad words. They could be video-tapped; the punishment for race innuendoes is dismissal from employment without a hearing.
Trump a racist
Michael Luo, of the New Yorker magazine, himself of Chinese ancestry, remembers when race epithets were tolerated in schools, and he and his brother were regarded as (a bad word) and told to go back to China.
Trump, in his attack on four Congresswomen of colour, rejuvenates that period of American life when people of colour were abused and made to feel that their home was somewhere else other than the US.
The election of Obama was supposed to put an end to race issues. Alas, race re-emerged as vicious as ever before.
Trump told off Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, born in Somalia to stop “viciously telling people of the US, the greatest and most powerful nation on earth, how our government is to be run. Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came? Then come back and show us how- . . . .”
Trump offers free travel to Somalia if Omar should wish to access the privilege.
Trump’s wife, Melania, is a recent immigrant from Slovenia.
A disgrace on the world stage
On my return from Zimbabwe, I took an off in Britain. Britain’s ambassador to the US, Sir Kim Darrock, had suffered what every diplomat fears the most. His candid evaluations of the Trump administration, which he had sent to the British Foreign Office expecting that they be kept under cover, had been leaked and published in a front cover story by the British tabloid, The Daily Mail.
With typical British superiority attitude, Sir Kim advised that Trump be treated like a child. “You need to start praising him for something he has done recently…you need whenever possible to present them as wins for him.”
This advice is found in Psychology 101 for freshmen teacher students. Make the kid feel important.
“As seen from here (US-Washington) we really don’t believe that this administration is going to become substantially more normal; less dysfunctional, less unpredictable, less faction-riven, less diplomatically clumsy and inept.”
Sir Kim added, with some surprise: “For a man who has risen to the highest office on the planet, President Trump radiates insecurity.”
Sir Kim missed the point that the elites in Washington, aided by their surrogates in the media, set about, even before inauguration, an insurance policy to drive him out of office in handcuffs to a jailhouse.
The charges of Trump’s collusion with the Russians (a treasonable offence) were made up by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Trump was justified in being insecure.
Trump would have been advised to let the matter rest without comment, as any president would have done.
Trump retaliated. Sir Kim was a fool, arrogant and stupid. Trump had an upcoming meeting with the British Trade minister. Sir Kim would have attended under normal circumstances.
Trump, being a barbarian that he was, took steps to “disinvite Sir Kim” and to warn that he would never speak to him again. Thus trade talks were jeopardised and Sir Kim’s goose was cooked.
Never mind that there is nothing Sir Kim said about Trump which was untrue.
To say that Trump has degraded the office of the US President is not correct. He gets into spats with such noneties like Jussie Smollet, a gay brother who acts in the play, The Empire.
Smollet recently got some Nigerians to beat him up and pretended that it was Trumpkins who called him racist epithets.
In another spat, Trump got into a “curse out” with the lesbian captain of the US soccer team, Megan Rapino. Trump challenged her to win the game first before speaking noise about his government.
The lesbian captain won the game and, taking her turn in speaking noise, disinvited her team to the White House, arguing that she would not honour a gay basher, a misogynist and a racist. In mentioning the phrase White House, she added a bad word which begins with an “F….”
All these spats are unbecoming of a president. But it was Bill Clinton who set the stage in the degradation of the president’s office. Clinton was accused by 23 women of molesting them before he became president.
His most egregious case, however, was that he invited a 22-year-old naïve intern, Monica Lewinsky, to the White House on several occasions. On these occasions, she kissed his private parts.
Now, we ask ourselves why Trump’s support has remained steady and unshaken. For the last 20 years, these elites replaced a simple moral code based on the Bible with a secular code called feel-good ethics.
When Clinton was asked why he did it, he answered: “Because I could.” Without the moral code of behaviour inherited, evangelicals see the social problems of the US as emanating from this permissive attitude.
They further see Trump as God’s warrior, fighting fire with fire, and at least standing up for “American values”. Anybody mentioning American values at an elite party will not be invited again.
The US, the elites believe, is the originator of slavery and racism, and that capitalism works best when cheap labour is driven to death with unpaid bills and ill-health. They call themselves progressives.
There is no common ground between the two, one secular and the other faith-based.
The secular global elites do not sympathise with the plight of the poor whites who have been driven off their comfortable textile jobs by outsourcing these to Mexico.
The New York Times editorial writer David Leonhardt says the bad news for Democrats is as follows: “Trump’s approval ratings have moved up by two percentage points in recent weeks…between 42 and 45% of Americans approve his performance.”
Democrats are waging a moral war with Trump over the handling of Latino babies separated from their parents on the Mexican border. They posture in favour of open borders.
Leonhardt has come to realise that the base Democrats, who voted for Trump in droves in 2016, are not willing to open borders to life-and-death competition.
