SLR: Is Trump losing it - or is the panic a political hoax?

Key topics:.Claims of Donald Trump’s cognitive decline dismissed as partisan spinSLR skewers ageism and selective outrage in Western politicsSatire targets elites, DEI culture and media double standards.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 to the BizNews channel here..By Simon Lincoln Reader*.I enjoyed a delightful thought sequence the day I put down Jacob Savage’s The Vanishing Writer, published in Compactmag and reportedly read over 20m times.My first instinct was to round up every white boomer I could and subject them to a base test – a few simple questions e.g “are we living in a climate emergency” or “have you ever worn one of those pink woollen hats with the cat ears and participated in a march alongside furious women”. If “yes” featured just once, they’d be trucked off to a warehouse to wait until I’d completed the exercise.What do you do with millions of former middle-to-senior management white boomers penned up wearing only y-fronts? Oddly, I got the answer from a boomer itself, no less than Winston Churchill’s grandson, Rupert Soames.Rupert was a Conservative MP for many years, and something of a bully. He used to confront then Labour deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, who had a history of bulimia and had previously worked in the canteen of a ship, and say, “hey, Giovanni, mine’s a gin and tonic – now ask my friend what he wants.”Rupert once said that the way to deal with anti-social oiks and yobs was to force them to run on treadmills to make electricity for old age homes. So I think that’s what you do when you have millions of aging units of George Floyd adoration and DEI volunteering: you put them on rowers and spinning bikes so they can power tattoo parlours or dentists who specialize in grills for African American rappers. I’d put Rupert there too, sorry.The question is ageism and its effect on faculty has surfaced in the context of Donald Trump and interpretations of his recent behaviour. This is, of course, heavily biased and convenient – the same scrutiny wasn’t heaped upon his predecessor, even when the motheaten sack shat himself in front of the Pope, or fell off his bicycle, or ventured into a random hedge on camera. All they did was chase him around with a syringe filled with Adderall.But Trump is apparently mental, something supposedly evidenced in a meeting attended by the Prime Minister of Slovakia, Robert Fico. Fico is an interesting guy: he’s both left and right, doesn’t fancy the guys in Brussels too much so takes any opportunity he can to humiliate them, and claims that “people don’t take Europe seriously anymore because of net zero and open borders”. Not mentioned in the coverage of that meeting was the fact that Trump-hostile EU diplomats attended too – and they were the group that supposedly briefed the media. Fico, for his part, is said to be enraged by the leaks.Some say it’s age, some say its pathological, but is there anything wrong with Trump irrespective of absent supporting facts, maybe…cheeseburgers? Trump doesn’t take alcohol, but he has been known to go to bed with a plastic bottle of full-fat Coca-Cola, one litre. He is said to be partial to fries, with his only exercise said to be the act of alighting from a golf cart, playing a shot, then getting back in. Realistically though, it’s a stretch.It’s clear that none of the people gossiping about Trump’s supposed cognitive decline have ever attended the entrance to the House of Lords in London. Ah. That’s special: why waste money watching The Exorcist at a drive-in when an idle Tuesday morning in Westminster can terrify you for a decade – for free?They do it for the cash you see, those guys and gals – £361 a day to be precise. Wheelchairs, zimmer frames, dogs, sticks and aides accompany the creaking, sometimes incoherent mumbling procession into the chamber, which is followed by statements from 719-year-olds, like, “I’m thinking of becoming a professional rugby player which will give me the opportunity to kneel for George Floyd weekly,” or “If you touch my pension I’ll stab you in the face”. The ancient baronesses get animated on that subject: many husbands have played away-games on them with other men, and they’ve had to endure the boredom and ignominy of charity patronage: not a chance in hell that younger politicians will threaten their nuts.Nobody briefed the venomous Daily Mail about former speaker Nancy Pelosi being ‘not of sound mind’ toward the end of her 500-year-or-so stint. When she and other senators decided to dress up in slave paraphernalia for social justice’s most bizarre performative theatre to date (2020), there was concern that the expert stock picker wouldn’t be able to get off the ground, and that winches would have to be deployed from the ceilings to assist the locked-ins. Her friend and fellow Californian Dianne Feinstein is possibly the worst case: when she cast a senate vote in September 2023, some suspected that she wasn’t actually alive anymore, and the voting button being pressed was just a twitch of the old rigor mortis. Her actual death was recorded some hours later.Just on the basis of history alone it is clear here that a new Trump hoax is being generated. This is nice because all the others worked so spectacularly well. Anyone sensible will tell you that if you subject someone to unnecessary and possibly illegal lawfare, rummage through his wife’s lingerie, try to shoot him in the head or make up stories about Russian hookers and golden showers, that someone might get a little vibey when he or she gets to make the calls.Age or term limit suggestions, as important as they should be, are not applicable here – because evidently double standards have been applied. But space exists in this frenzied week for a question: who is madder? On one side, you have a guy who is doing much of what he campaigned for: sorry, that’s just what happens. On the other, you have my warehouses bursting with white former executives, who consciously participated in the (not constitutionally enforced) ANC-ification of their organisations, failed to invest in future infrastructure, then insisted upon cheap imported labour and began to see the world not as nations and people not as people: just all as cash metrics.The good news is that you can still be useful if you’re mad, so here I would donate a substantial volume of my boomer inventory to medical research, in particular, monkeypox. Do those poor lovely Beagles in cages a solid?.*Simon Lincoln Reader grew up in Cape Town before moving to Johannesburg in 2001, where he was an energy entrepreneur until 2014. In South Africa, he wrote a weekly column for Business Day, then later Biznews.com. Today he is a partner at a London-based litigation funder, a trustee of an educational charity, and a member of the advisory board of the Free Speech Union of South Africa. He travels frequently between California, the UK, and South Africa. All on his green passport..This article was first published on Daily Friend and is republished with permision

SLR: Is Trump losing it - or is the panic a political hoax?

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