"A presidency whose most salient features are amorality, greed, demagoguery, deception, misogyny and - potentially - a murky relationship with a foreign government."
A working definition of President Jacob Zuma's administration?
 For "greed" read the Gupta e-mails; "deception" is a kind word for the deal to "sell" their media assets to Jimmy Manyi; on "misogyny", look no further than the flight from justice of women-batterer Grace Mugabe. On the "murky foreign relationship", just go to our president's obsession with Russian nuclear power.
Recently - with nary a blush - our president delivered the opening speech at the Brics bank in Sandton. But strangely enough, the man he fired as finance minister, Nhlanhla Nene, who the president had promised would be its regional head, was nowhere in sight.Another lie, four finance ministers ago.
The white monopoly capital demagoguery and blatant lies about the levels of black ownership of our economy - panel-beating wrong facts to fuel political grievance - are all of a piece with the president's proclaimed innocence of any acts of corruption. But he's spent the past nine years evading 783 criminal charges.
Actually, the opening paragraph of this article was a jeremiad against US President Donald Trump, penned by David Remnick, liberal editor of the New Yorker.
And that was before the horrifying events following Charlottesville, Virginia, when Trump doubled down on his equivocating rhetoric and false moral equivalence.
On that bloody subject, Ronald Reagan's speech writer, Peggy Noonan, acidly slammed Trump's inability to call things for what they are: "There were neo-Nazis, anti-Semitic chants, white supremacists; a woman was killed and many people were injured. It's not hard to figure out who and what needed to be castigated - clearly, unambiguously, immediately."Under apartheid and colonialism, two totems Zuma is happy to use as alibis for the failures of his administration, it was called "divide and rule". It worked back then in buying off some people and suppressing others. But it's no elixir for a modern economy billed as a constitutional democracy.
"Secret sauce" was the term JPMorgan banking tsar Jamie Dimon used to describe trust, the basis for growth and success in societies. When the bottle runs dry, according to the Economist, and distrust sets in, countries start to unravel. You want a reason for the R1.3-trillion on which investors here sit and won't spend? There's a core explanation.
Trump lies about "fake news" in the US to explain the inexplicable and inexcusable. Here, conjuring up phantasms from the past works well enough until it doesn't work at all. Last year, despite Cyril Ramaphosa warning about the "Boers coming back", enough former ANC voters gave the opposition control of four of five major metros.
This month our annual women's month was contaminated by a battering ram of a deputy minister (now pushed from executive office but maintaining parliamentary status) and an indemnified first lady with a penchant for beating young women.
But in the wider world, this August marked the 10th anniversary of the start of the great global recession, when the US subprime crisis saw major financial institutions collapse or get government bailouts. Thousands lost their homes. Trust in financial markets evaporated.
The same trust deficit that applies in South African and US politics today was at the centre of the world economic crisis back then. Ten years later, in its wake, we saw such improbable events as Brexit, the election of Trump and the rise of the Labour Party's Jeremy Corbyn. In each case the voters' cure is probably worse than their widespread distrust of elites and conventional opinion. But that story still plays out.That's why the Financial Times noted the "dark legacy" left over from August 2007. It was caused by complexity, fraud and over-leveraging, all followed by cascading fear. Only dramatic interventions stopped the recession morphing into a depression. But still, as the newspaper editorialised, "no one has been held accountable".
And whether it is collapsed financial markets or corrupt but unindicted politicians, the distrust engendered becomes contagious.
Trump gives voice to his fervent supporters, even the worst of them. Zuma surfs the outrage of such local charlatans and Gupta mercenaries as Black First Land First and Mzwanele Manyi. He does so because of his own trust deficit and uncleansed criminal charges.
The next president here will have a large menu of clean-ups if he or she is to do better. Even Hercules would be hard pressed. But it starts with restoring broken trust. The US has to wait longer for the end of Trump. But neither country could really do worse.
• Leon is a former DA leader and ambassador to Argentina..