Who else watched that fascinating interview between Donald Trump and ABC reporter Terry Moran? It was meant to be a reflective look at his first 100 days in the White House. Again. The most fascinating bit was when Moran corrected Trump on his assertion that Salvadoran deportee Abrego Garcia had the letters MS-13 (a criminal gang) tattooed on his knuckles. Trump simply ignored several attempts by Moran to explain that the photograph he’d seen had been Photoshopped.
Trump's admirers point to these moments of unreasonable intransigence as proof of his “genius”, how he’s able to manipulate the media by rewriting the script on communication. It is straight out of the Idi Amin module on effective leadership: just string words together without worrying about reason, coherence and credibility. And maybe they’re right.
It may well be that just saying the first thing that comes to mind without worrying about making any sense is a form of genius. Back in my student days there was a fellow who had created a legend around himself for his exploits in mathematics. It didn’t really matter what the context was, but if you had more than a five-minute conversation with him he would answer one of your questions with a knowing tap to his temple and say: “Because Ali was a boxer.” The last I heard of him, he was busy with his master’s in mathematics, ostensibly because “The Greatest” was a boxer. To this day I have no earthly idea what he was on about.
The flipside of this coin is an urban myth about a man who stood on the banks of a raging Black Umfolozi River, blocking the only crossing point. A party of travellers finds him standing there in a trance-like state chanting quietly to himself: “68, 68, 68 ...” Understandably wary that the fellow might be a dangerous lunatic, they stop and try to ascertain his state of mind. After 20 minutes of him ignoring them and continuing to chant, “68, 68, 68 …”, a brave young man steps right up to him. The chanter grabs him by the torso, hurls him into the raging Umfolozi torrent and starts chanting, “69, 69, 69 ...”
I would like to go down in the annals of history as a misunderstood genius, despite all the evidence to the contrary
There is a grossly overstated truism to the effect that genius and insanity are indistinguishable from the “normal” brain. Certainly, when it came to Dr John Nash, the subject of the biography A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar, this holds true. I just don’t know that it applies to Robert F Kennedy jnr, US secretary of health and human services and the son of the slain senator Robert Kennedy. I recently watched his performance in some US Senate hearing, rambling on about the first thing that came to his mind. He clearly has been guzzling heartily on the Trump Kool-Aid.
I would like to go down in the annals of history as a misunderstood genius, despite all the evidence to the contrary. However, if we’ve learnt nothing else from recent history, it is that anybody can be called a genius. I’ve been thinking about what my “genius” line that I’m going to be remembered by will be. The front-runner at this point is: “Remember that a cucumber is a fruit.” Hot on the heels of that zinger is: “Pluto was a planet once.”
These are the kinds of things you say with a mysterious smirk while pointing at your temple in every conversation and television interview until it’s your signature line. This is what made Samuel L Jackson’s portrayal of Jules in Pulp Fiction so memorable. Movie buffs have been racking their brains for three decades in attempts to decipher the meaning of the line “The path of the righteous man …", when, in truth, it was just a random thing he used to say.
The day I stand up to receive my Nobel Prize in Literature after authoring the great South African novel to rival Cry, the Beloved Country or Jock of the Bushveld, remember that you heard it here first. If Trump is teaching us anything, it is that there are millions of people all over the world who can’t distinguish between lunacy and genius and that we must exploit them. Why? Because Ali was a boxer who loved the cucumber fruit as much as the former planet Pluto. It is also my firm genius prediction that in the same year that I win the Nobel Prize, a certain former immigrant from Olifantsfontein named Gerhardus Jacobus Vermeulen gets sworn in as US secretary of homeland security. Good luck with getting your visa if you ever tweeted anything about Voetsekkers in May of 2025.
