The history of our race, and each individual’s experience, are sown thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill and that a lie told well is immortal.

–Mark Twain

The news coming out of America has me laughing really hard and often. In fact, it’s become so frequent that if my doctor asks if I’m exercising, I will claim that laughing at America is now part of my routine morning workout.

The thing is, I’m not alone. The waves of laughter generated worldwide at the dystopian reality show that passes for American news must be deafening. Honestly, it’s nervous laughter most of the time because your psychotic politics are contagious.

The time difference between where I live and the US is around six hours, or more from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast. Fortunately I don’t have to cringe in horror as the shit hits the fan; I’m fast asleep. By the time the news reaches me, it’s no longer breaking and in some cases already superseded by newer, more insane events.

While most American media sources call it Breaking News, it is, truthfully, Broken News. There’s nothing whole or wholesome about it. It’s news made by broken politicians and digested by people who are already broken or valiantly resisting disintegration.

Each blatant lie from the Trump administration, each vindictive accusation, each flowery hyperbole, each false promise, each preposterous claim, each shady deal, each contrived revelation, each attempt to hide the truth, each denial and deflection, each misstep, each miscalculation, each walk-back, each caving in the face of firm opposition (as in the China, Mexico and Canada tariff debacle) and each failure are uproariously more hilarious than the last.

Perhaps this era in American history will at some future point be officially known as Trumpism. Similar periods in American history, like Prohibition and McCarthyism, were generously described as foolish. However, Trumpism is different. The rise of the MAGA cult is the culmination of decades of imperialist swagger, neglect, electoral fraud, crass celebrity and dollar worship, and a decline in rational thought.

The MAGA assault on free speech, constitutional liberties, honesty, decency and morality is clear and unmistakable. Those who have succumbed to the appeal of the MAGA cult and are lost to the rational world… for the moment at least. The world observes this assault on humanity, but it seems helpless to cope effectively.

Donald Trump has elicited gleeful derision since his first term of office, right through his farcical claims of voter fraud while attempting to snatch a second term. The Democrats’ attempts to address his criminality failed to put him out to pasture permanently. It was, in fact, laughable, as was their governance, which promised more principled governance, yet delivered the opposite. The laughter stopped abruptly when Joe Biden validated America’s appetite for imperialist warmongering when he continued to provide military and diplomatic support for the mass slaughter of Palestinians, despite ample evidence of an unfolding genocide by Israel.

The Democrats, we were implored to believe, were the good guys. They proved they’re no different, but confirmed their credentials for being a willing partner in a criminally corrupt democracy. It was probably inevitable that their greed and preoccupation with wealth and power dynamics would pave the way for a return of, indisputedly, the worst President in American history.

Trump, the attention-craving narcissist, embodies the disturbing wickedness we’ve come to expect of evil villains from Hollywood movies. Hollywood, for its part, has been a reliable propaganda machine that pushed the illusion of American exceptionalism for decades. Still, if they presented a script based on America’s current reality, I’m sure it would be rejected as too far-fetched.

Hilarity, chaos, and vengeance have become the new normal since Trump slithered back into power and surrounded himself with an even more sycophantic administration than the last one. I don’t know what to expect from one day to the next, and I don’t think Americans do either. Worse, I suspect the bungling, servile thugs in his administration are as clueless. They’re along for the ride of their corrupt lives, providing crass comic cameos that frequently eclipse their Dear Leader.

The crackpots who constantly hover in Trump’s orbit are supposed to be steering America forward in a direction that instils confidence among its citizens and a world expecting its hyped leadership. Yet, all they’ve achieved thus far is to reinforce and amplify the cynical culture wars that have taken up permanent residence in Trump’s evidently mentally-challenged head.

JD Vance, the mascara-wearing vice president, has done little except shadow Trump and make a big show of ingratiating himself. The other shadow-president, Elon Musk, is an egotistical, thin-skinned billionaire who bought Twitter because of a desperate need to control the narratives, legitimately mocking him. He also bought a seat at the Mad Hatter’s table for over $ 200 million.

I kid you not. Trump’s cabinet meetings resemble a mad hatter’s gathering with red and black MAGA hats placed before the servile nincompoops flanking Trump around the table. As the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) leader, Musk has been indiscriminately cutting social programmes. He’s also used the opportunity to criminally gut those federal agencies investigating his fraudulent business activities. He also follows Trump practically everywhere like a little puppy dog, sometimes wearing his four-year-old son, X Æ A-Xii, on his shoulders, which some have likened to a human shield.

Stephen Miller, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, is an anti-immigrant, White nationalist hate-monger with the ghoulish dead eyes, bald head and stern face that is the living embodiment of Nosferatu. Miller is also the chief architect of all those preposterous Executive Orders that Trump delights in signing like a four-year-old. He’s also behind attempts to end both birthright citizenship and habeas corpus.

The new US Attorney General, Pam Bondi, is hell-bent on destroying due process rights and deporting migrants to a concentration camp in El Salvador. When she’s not busy being an evil bitch, she spend her time showering Trump with the kind of sycophantic adulation reminiscent of the cult of personality practised by adherents in North Korea. To be fair, this grovelling and servile idolatry seems to be a precondition for all Trump’s cabinet members at the weekly Mad Hatters meeting.

Then there’s Pete Hegseth, the former Fox News propagandist now trying desperately to be taken seriously as the National Defence Secretary. Hegseth goes through wives like America goes through military stockpiles. He also just can’t seem to stay off the social media chat groups and the sauce.

Let’s not forget Bondi’s perfect partner in crime, Kristi Noem. She executes Bondi’s illegal deportation wet dreams with calculated determination and the same inhumanity she boastfully flaunted when she shot her dog and goat. When Noem, also known as ICE Barbie, does not pretend to be the Secretary of Homeland Security, she frequently changes costumes to cosplay the critical societal roles for which she’s the least qualified.

Last but not least, Trump’s new press secretary must surely be the cherry on top of this administration, which is nuttier than a fruitcake. If you thought Trump’s previous Press Secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, was an absolute horror show, Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s new chief propagandist, is the smoothest, most inhumane liar to ever torment my poor ears. Trump has undoubtedly found a winner in this doe-eyed, servile, fork-tongued, pretend-Christian hypocrite. The effortless manner in which she lies, deflects, spins, and insults must be the envy of every male degenerate.

Leavitt possesses the reckless assuredness of knowledge which best exemplifies the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Her proficiency at lying sometimes exposes her abysmal understanding of much of the subject matter she lies about. She appears confident that bluster and bullying will compensate for, or mask, her apparent ignorance. This was evident, for example, when she lied about why the Librarian of Congress was fired, seemingly unaware that children don’t borrow books from that institution.

America is a deeply divided, deeply troubled country. That much is terribly evident to almost the entire world now. Trump may talk and act like a clown, but he also exposes the true America. While we may be laughing at the current administration, we have strong reason to feel insulted by the bullying and the pervasive lie that America is better than the rest at practically everything.

Trump is not the problem, though. It would be too easy, too convenient to blame him alone. America’s apparent decline has been long in the making. Trump is the product of a society in decline. He’s the grotesque illegitimate spawn of a mass orgy of capitalism on steroids, celebrity worship, crass consumerism, selfishness, and grand delusions of acquiring immense wealth and fame.

Despots don’t elect themselves into power. They require a pliable electorate, an electorate willing to suspend credulity to massage and bolster their bigoted biases. Trump has the assurance of that deference in spades.

Trump doesn’t think his base is gullible. He knows.

Thirty years ago, astronomer and author Carl Sagan wrote about the dumbing down of American society in his magnificent book, The Demon Haunted World. He saw Trump’s America coming all those years ago.

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

The MAGA cult represents a significant slice of the population – perhaps a third, around 100 million people, maybe more. That’s a lot of people who seem to be obsessed with owning the libs. But they have been enabled by a corrupt media community that planted the seeds of division and hate, and then went on to celebrate journalistic dishonesty. Some outfits like Fox have the audacity to call it news.

Mainstream media do not challenge the lies and corruption emanating from the White House and Congress. They’re just happy to have a presence at news briefings, etc. There was a time when journalists like Barbara Walters pushed back at the lies they were being fed. These days, journalists are afraid of losing their seats in the press room or not getting invited to the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner. In an old interview with Trump, in which he was not allowed to wriggle his way out of uncomfortable questions, Walters exemplified the journalistic backbone that is sorely lacking, not only in America but worldwide.

South Africans may remember a 70s Fritos corn chips advertisement jingle that proclaimed that “Americans are crazy.” That was ostensibly a good kind of crazy. The MAGA kind of crazy, however, is a debilitating disease the world does not need to entertain now, or ever.