I don’t know why I am still so shocked by Donald Trump’s actions.
I think it’s because I grew up in an era where we all admired America and wished we could visit some day to see The Golden Gate Bridge, the old quarters of New Orleans, The Grand Canyon, Mount Rushmore and the Statue of Liberty.
Trump has made America a lot less attractive to many.
And given his disdain for immigrants (except ones from Norway, of course), I’m pretty sure it doesn’t bother him at all.
The other thing that constantly surprises me is how many Capetonians are in love with him.
They make a point of writing to me every time I am critical of the man. But I may understand why.
You see, there has been a targeted campaign on social media to sanitise certain stories around Trump, or present the story with what has become known as “alternative facts”.
This is given traction on Facebook by people who subscribe to certain groups, allowing them to live in this bubble of disillusionment.
They consider everything else fake news.
It is now accepted by anyone with a brain that it’s Russian agents who are behind these stories that continue to flood the internet.
So Trump’s meeting with Vladimir Putin last week suddenly makes a lot of sense.
He wasn’t prepared to criticise Putin while they stood face-to-face.
But the moment he saw the backlash from even those who normally support him, he made up that idiotic story about having misspoken.
His supporters seemed happy, overlooking the fact that he had corrected just one word of his original statement, but none of the other awful things he said about his own security staff.
I read something in the week that said we would laugh at a movie script that had a villain like Trump - a larger-than-life, cartoonish, narcissist, who was also boorish, prejudiced, given to lying and with tyrannical impulses.
But here we are, with just such a man in charge of the world’s most advanced economy and military. A man who is able to redefine reality on his own terms.
I always used to wonder how evil men like Hitler were able to garner and maintain great support in their times; how entire societies could blindly follow them into what everybody else agrees is pure madness.
Don is helping me understand it.
Because he disrupts conventional wisdom and distracts people from the facts, I have taken to calling what he does “Distrumption”.
And that’s because that same article reminded me of the quote that “everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts”.