TOM EATON | Oh what Ramaphosa would do to have his own ‘Dr Fauci’

As Cyril Ramaphosa reads the news that Donald Trump is selling his social media posts like a Medici pope hawking indulgences, the envy must cut deep.

If you missed that story ― a strong possibility, for reasons I’ll get to in a moment ― the gist is as follows.

Once, the difference between making a fortune in the markets and losing it came down to the speed of horses, the map-reading ability of their riders, or, later, the proximity of a telegraph machine and an operator who could play it like Mozart doing a show-stopping trill.

Today, the horses and riders and virtuosic tappers are all gone, replaced by vastly powerful computers able to collect data, analyse it and even make autonomous trading decisions. But speed is still king, and getting news a millisecond before everyone else can be a hugely profitable scoop.

Over in the gilded, gravy-splattered court of King Donald, that fact has clearly animated the brains trust; and over the weekend the Trump self-enrichment machine launched a new grift, offering to sell Wall Street access to Trump’s Truth Social posts ― many of which move markets for the price of oil ― a millisecond before they’re seen by the rest of the world.

As the head of one trading firm in the US told AP, “if this was the CEO of a public company, this would be jail time.”

But of course it won’t be. There won’t even be a scandal. Which brings me back to Ramaphosa’s envy.

It’s not the money, of course. Ramaphosa has lots of that, and besides, it’s still absurdly easy to make a pile in the ANC: over the weekend the Sunday Times reported allegations that a crony of the party Ramaphosa leads has allegedly leeched more than R1bn out of Prasa through apparently dodgy deals. South Africa’s kleptocracy is doing just fine: in this country, simply existing downwind of Ramaphosa and his colleagues can be enough to shower you with intergenerational wealth.

I’m not even talking about the weekend’s ‘invasion of Spain’ by 60,000 migrants who rushed from Africa to Africa and then, to the intense disappointment of the tabloid-owning class in Britain, all went home to Africa.

No, the envy is about something else: the shortage of good smokescreens for our lame-duck president and his wretched, collapsing party.

This week, as Trump completely obliterated Iran’s military capability for the fourteenth time, and farmers in Red states paid on average 44% more for diesel than they did before Trump agreed to fight Israel’s war for it, and he continued to protect rich paedophiles while grudgingly deciding to stop trying to frame and jail an innocent man for doing the damage to the Washington DC reflecting pool that his own contractors had done, the doting eyes of his followers were entirely locked onto a single, enormous column of smoke.

I’m not talking about the column of smoke where large parts of France used to be: to most of the political right those fires signify nothing but an entirely normal summer. And if Romania is now blowing up bits of the Danube’s river bed to help a small trickle reach the Cernavodă nuclear power plan so it can cool it down, that’s just because Romanians are a festive people and like making loud bangs and has nothing to do with radical climate change, which is a liberal hoax.

I’m not even talking about the weekend’s “invasion of Spain” by 60,000 migrants who rushed from Africa to Africa and then, to the intense disappointment of the tabloid-owning class in Britain, all went home to Africa.

No, I’m talking about the show trial of Dr Anthony Fauci, Trump’s former Covid-19 czar, a spectacle in which MAGA inquisitors have lined up to take turns declaring that they saw Fauci dancing in the woods with Abigail Williams back in 2020.

This reference is only slightly satirical, by the way: South African MAGA supporters are repeating all the latest talking points fed to them from the US but adding some local spice of their own, and this week I’ve seen a few insist that Fauci is probably a literal demon.

Yes, Ramaphosa must be looking at that magnificent cloud of sulphur-infused smoke and gnashing his teeth with frustration.

I mean, it’s not as if we can’t cook up beautiful, crowd-pleasing lies here at home: just this weekend I watched the leader of Merch and Merch, sorry, I mean, March and March, tell a conservative British podcaster that “South Africa is currently going through a very serious religious takeover,” presumably by Muslims who comprise a massive 1.5% to 2% of the population.

So why can’t the ANC put up at least a few puffs of a half-hearted smokescreen?

Oh, I remember, now: some cadre sold the matches for a million bucks a match.