BARNEY MTHOMBOTHI | Trump knows he’s lying about us, but we’ve been our own worst enemy

Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced American financier and convicted child sex offender who committed suicide in jail six years ago, had some choice words for Donald Trump in a slew of e-mails released by the US Congress this week.

Epstein, who made his millions as a financial consultant, used his connections to cultivate an elite social circle and was found to have procured young girls who were sexually abused by him and his friends. Despite a friendship spanning years and the existence of pictures of the two men together, Trump has consistently denied any involvem+ent with the girls. But his name comes up in the more than 20,000 pages of documents from Epstein’s estate subpoenaed by Congress.

Trump “knew about the girls”, Epstein says in one e-mail to an associate. Describing Trump in another as “the dog that hasn’t barked”, Epstein mentioned one young woman who “spent hours at my house with him”.

The scandal around Epstein has felled others, but not Trump.

Britain’s Prince Andrew now goes by the name Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor after he was stripped of royal entitlements by his brother, King Charles, because of the shame his entanglement in the Epstein debacle has brought to the royal family. And Peter Mandelson was summarily discharged from his duties as British ambassador to Washington after the scale of his involvement with Epstein was exposed. Trump is judged by different standards.

Epstein has a throwaway nugget that should strike a chord with many people. He refers to Trump as “borderline insane” in an e-mail. And yet the local chapter of his cult, a vocal lot, continues to insist we should be taking moral lessons from such a seemingly depraved individual. Ideology or self-interest has a tendency to close people’s minds.

Trump is taking up too much of our time and emotions. He has a bee in his bonnet about South Africa. I’m not sure there’s a country under the sun that he loathes more — and he’s summoned all the powers at his disposal to throw dirt at us. Such a miserable excuse of a human being, he was at it again this week, peddling his usual lies about the government committing genocide against Afrikaners and confiscating their land. Maybe instead of being mad at him, we should feel sorry for him. He’s hurting. He needs help. Hatred is corroding what’s left of his soul.

Government officials keep saying Trump is being misled or fed false information. That is a delusion.

But he seems a bit indecisive about the G20 summit. When Trump first announced that he’d boycott the meeting, there was a collective wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth from the government, as though the sky was about to collapse. President Cyril Ramaphosa, with a delegation cobbled together in a hurry, hotfooted to Washington with the intention of not only debunking the genocide canard but also of begging Trump to show up for the summit — only to walk into a well-laid trap intended to humiliate him. Trump likes it when people prostrate themselves before him, pleading for mercy. We did a fair bit of grovelling and got nothing in return.

Then we were told Vice-President JD Vance would lead the US delegation to the summit. Now Trump, the great prevaricator, has changed his mind again: nobody is coming. But he has gone further this time, questioning South Africa’s membership of the G20.

Government officials keep saying Trump is being misled or fed false information. That is a delusion. It shows an inability or refusal to face reality. Trump knows exactly what he’s doing. As Mark Twain once said, no amount of evidence will ever persuade an idiot. He knows he’s peddling lies, but he’s not about to put an end to it because lies have paid handsome political dividends for him throughout his career, be it in business or politics. He’s wielded lies like a weapon.

Trump, though, should be a seminal lesson for the ANC. After the 1994 elections, the world was our oyster. The international community was happy for us and wanted nothing but to see us succeed. We were the poster child of what the world would want to see of itself — a people resolving their differences through peaceful means and then proceeding to make a serious attempt to live together.

We threw all that away. International goodwill was squandered by a party still tethered to long-discredited ideological shibboleths. We squandered our capital through frolicking with murderous autocrats like Vladimir Putin and protecting rogues such as Robert Mugabe and Muammar Gaddafi while giving the middle finger to those who could help us grow our economy and create jobs for our people.

And, of course, we trashed our brand by looting and mismanaging the state. Phrases such as “white monopoly capital” and “Washington consensus” have come to express our contempt for the creators of wealth. We became too arrogant and entitled. We came to believe our own propaganda that we punched above our weight. We forgot that ideology is now passé. What people need is food, jobs and, yes, those potholes to be filled.

While his predecessors may have indulged us, Trump — painful as it may seem — is simply reminding us to be cognisant of which side our bread is buttered.