Dirk Hartford: How SA needs to play bullyboy Donald Trump

Key topics:From Washington to Pretoria, a world caught between fading imperial dominance and an uncertain, AI-driven future.Trump’s transactional power politics, tech-bro influence and the return of the global bully.South Africa’s dilemma: non-alignment in an age of surveillance, populism and collapsing old certainties..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up for the BizNews channel here..By Dirk Hartford.It's one year since Trump’s inauguration, and things are, in Yeats’s words, “all changed, changed utterly: a terrible beauty is born”.After 500-plus years of white colonialism and imperialism, and 80 years of post-WW2 decolonisation and reconstruction, the Empire has reached its apogee with Trump.In the Empire’s death agony, all kinds of morbid symptoms have and will continue to appear. Trump’s latest tariffs against 8 European nations over Greenland demonstrate that even his erstwhile allies in the Empire, many of whom are trending rightwards on the same immigration issues at the centre of Trump’s domestic campaign, are not safe from his derangement.So why should SA be safe, and what could SA possibly do to assuage him, pray tell? Trump doesn’t need anybody to tell him about farm murders to save SA whites from genocide.He needs to save the only whites on the planet in sufficient numbers who are not part of the Empire - the colonialists of a special type, as the SACP calls it - from genocide when and if his domestic situation demands it.Trump may well be a malignant narcissist, a fascist, a racist and a serial sex offender, a la his pal Epstein. He is also the head of the most powerful nation on earth with the keys to an apocalyptic nuclear arsenal.In his one year in power, he has all but dismantled the woke institutions and culture of the democratic state. To the extent that he is already questioning the need for mid-term elections, can one even imagine free and fair elections in the US in 3 years' time ?Trump is for himself, his tech bros and the super rich only and his modus operandi is overtly transactional and brutal.The world has never experienced leadership remotely like this - not least of all because of the technology and scale of wealth that the tech bros bring to the party.With Nvidia’s chips, Palantir’s technology and AI, and not forgetting Meta, Google, etc. in social media, Trump et al are a hop and skip away from near total control over, and surveillance of, ordinary people in the US and soon elsewhere too.Things look like Leonard Cohen's prophetic voice before he died - “You want it darker, we kill the flame”..Read more:.How World sees SA: Ramaphosa heads to Washington for high-stakes talks with Trump amid diplomatic storm.If there is a bright light in what is coming down the track, it comes from the richest bro on the planet, Elon Musk.Besides predicting that all people currently working on computers will be redundant soon, he says AI and robotics will introduce a level of productivity which will make work optional and a universal high income for all feasible.Imagine that. The socialist dream bequeathed by imperialism - the highest stage of capitalism - to the long-suffering masses of the world. The 99%.Such an outcome would radically ameliorate social inequality - the biggest driver of discontent on the planet - and usher in a workless type of future unimaginable right now.The chances of this happening seem slim. More likely is that, for a while at least, Trump - as far and away the biggest bully on our playground - will get his way.The best course of action in such a scenario is to do everything possible to avoid antagonising the big bully, even when they go after other bullies, as in Venezuela and Iran.And to bide one's time as best as possible under the circumstances.There is only one force on earth that is going to stop the Trump bully, and that is the American people themselves.The same applies in Venezuela and Iran. In the leaderless uprising in Iran right now, people seem to be galvanising around a vision that totally excludes jihadism and radical Islam.But what it includes is not yet clear. In the meantime, images from the Shah’s time are invoked as the most obvious antidote to the venal vision of the ayatollahs.Similar sentiments are displayed when South Africans say, not without reason, that conditions in the townships were better under the apartheid regime.It might then happen that a majority of blacks accept that whites in government are a better solution than the corruption of the ANC.The new world that is beckoning must both transcend the wokeness that Trump’s MAGA is revolting against and Trump’s fascistic solutions as well. So too in South Africa.South Africa should seek to maintain its non-aligned posture in these times, neither further antagonising the bully nor alienating the BRICS countries. It can’t be one way or another, no matter how much the current scenario is demanding that one take sides.

Dirk Hartford: How SA needs to play bullyboy Donald Trump

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