TONY LEON: Malusi Gigaba shares Donald Trump’s aversion to the truth
The apparently reckless US president has mastered the art of blurting out falsehoods — particularly in the witness box
Extract
Here’s a teaser as political enthusiasts absorb the results this morning of the hugely significant midterm elections for control of the US Congress.
What is the difference between embattled local home affairs minister Malusi Gigaba and Donald Trump?
The obvious answer is that both have, via audio or video, had matters best left in the bedroom put on excruciating and embarrassing display. In Gigaba’s case, it was via a hacked cellphone, and in Trump’s case it was the enraged detail provided of his nether regions by his scorned (alleged) former paramour, the magnificently named pornographic actress Stormy Daniels.
The next similarity is both men’s difficulty with telling the truth.
According to the The Washington Post, Trump has told an amazing torrent of falsehoods. Its Fact Checker site reported that in the seven weeks leading up to Tuesday’s midterm election, he made 1,419 false or misleading claims — a whopping average of 30 a day. His grand total for false or misleading claims since taking office as the 45th president of the US until the end of October, is 6,420. Now of course the word, or credibility, of the president of the world’s greatest hyper-power matters a whole lot more than a falsehood uttered by a middle-ranking cabinet minister of a middle-range country like SA. But as Gigaba fights a rearguard to hang onto his job, he might consider two other essential and defining differences between his fraught, objectively hopeless situation and President Trump’s position. Trump is likely to see his party lose control of one chamber of Congress by the end of Wednesday, the House of Representatives, and his legal problems could worsen and darken in days as ...
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