As Donald Trump orders his cult to stop thinking about Jeffrey Epstein, and says they’re “stupid” if they keep wondering why Trump appears in so many happy photographs with a man he claims he never really liked, and how a very public trial featuring verified crimes could be a “hoax”, and why, if it was a hoax, then-president Trump allowed Epstein to be jailed for it, there’s at least one Trump fan in Africa who knows exactly what to believe.
Last week, when the leaders of Gabon, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mauritania and Senegal gathered in the White House and agreed, in a desperately awkward sort of way, that Trump should definitely be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, many pundits said it was a degrading spectacle, with Al Jazeera suggesting that they had “played the role of loyal colonial subject”.
It was certainly hard to watch, but in their defence, the current record for cringing buttock-smooching by the international community is held by Nato secretary-general Mark Rutte, sending Trump gushing texts in private before revealing way too much about his views of parenting by referring to Trump as “Daddy”.
Certainly, the performance of slightly reluctant hem-kissing by the African leaders was far more dignified than what MAGA itself is doing right now, best illustrated by former journalist Megyn Kelly in a conversation this week with conservative pod person Ben Shapiro.
But to tell yourself that Biden fiddled the files (which both exist and don’t exist) to make Trump look bad, and then deliberately didn’t foreground the newly jiggled files during his presidential campaign, and then didn’t give them to Kamala Harris once he dropped out, takes self-lobotomy to new lows.
Covering her bases by using the patented Joe Rogan Defence, whereby you introduce pure bullshit into a conversation disguised as admissible hearsay, Kelly said she’d heard “a few different people” suggest that Joe Biden’s administration “might have left the Epstein Files in such a manner that it leads directly with an arrow towards Donald Trump, just as a middle finger towards Trump, not that he did anything whatsoever, just that they’re bastards and they knew he was coming in”.
The mental gymnastics required for this; to know that Epstein was jailed while Trump was president; that he had his neck broken in a cell he shared with a dirty NYPD cop awaiting trial for kidnapping and murdering four people; that the CCTV footage of the night of Epstein’s death had up to three minutes cut out of it; that Epstein described Trump in 2017 as his “closest friend for 10 years”; that Epstein claimed to have had sex with Melania Trump on his plane, a plane named ‘The Lolita Express’ after the obsession of a famous fictional paedophile; to know that in 2002 Trump told New York Magazine that “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side” — to know all that and still ignore it is one thing.
But to tell yourself that Biden fiddled the files (which both exist and don’t exist) to make Trump look bad, and then deliberately didn’t foreground the newly jiggled files during his presidential campaign, and then didn’t give them to Kamala Harris once he dropped out, takes self-lobotomy to new lows.
But I digress. The point is that everyone is degrading themselves for their golden idol; but down here in Southern Africa, one leader seems to have spotted a kindred spirit in Trump and figured out exactly how to play this.
On Wednesday, the government of Eswatini confirmed the arrival in that blighted kingdom of five people deported from the US on the grounds that they were illegal immigrants and, in the words of the US Department of Homeland Security, “individuals so barbaric that their home countries [Vietnam, Jamaica, Laos, Yemen and Cuba] refused to take them back”.
Of course, dumping immigrants in a third country is not a new idea — the Tories in the UK worked for years on a plan to send Channel-crossing migrants to Rwanda. The transactional nature of these plans is also nothing new: the Brits were very open about the fact that they would shower Rwanda with cash.
What is new, however, is the second Trump presidency, is mired in allegations of vast corruption, whether opaque meme coins, shorting or piling into stocks or currencies before major policy announcements, or allegedly getting supplicants to pay large sums to access the president.
It's possible that the US and Eswatini did a transparent and only moderately unfair trade deal to grease the wheels of the prisoner dump, with Trump dangling tariff relief in front of Mswati or whichever terrified courtier actually cooks the kingdom’s books.
It could all be a totally normal political transaction.
But when one party is a man who boasted about walking into underage girls’ dressing rooms at beauty pageants and is now trying to make everyone ignore his links to a known paedophile, and the other is King Mswati, a medieval-style king living in obscene luxury while his people struggle in poverty and neglect, normal transactions seem a tad unlikely.
To be clear, I would never suggest the possibility that the Trump administration has paid Mswati personally to open up a nice little black site on the other side of the world. I have no proof of that at all, none at all, so I want you to stop thinking about that right now, the way MAGA has to stop thinking about Epstein.
But if I was Mswati, and I had the chance to make a little extra on the side in crisp dollars delivered by jet ... Ah, forget it. Seriously. Forget it.
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