Elphas: Marcus Zahaba Online Radio, serving you wherever you are. Four minutes after 12 p.m. Central African time, welcome to the Tuesday edition of the News Hour right here on Marcus Zahaba Online Radio — the voice of Ahlus Sunnah wal Jama’at. My name is Alpha Simposi; it’s a great honor to be with you this afternoon.

We are together from now up until 12:55. It’s been a very juicy morning when it comes to news. We look at the Matlanga Commission and the Ad Hoc Committee — very explosive from both sides. The big question is, what’s going to happen at the end?

However, I have a story for you this afternoon. I’m not sure if you know about the No Kings protest taking place in the United States of America. We’re going to look into that and get some analysis regarding that particular protest. Over the past week, some Republican leaders were hoping that Saturday’s No Kings demonstrations — marches and rallies hosted by a coalition of liberal groups across the country and worldwide — would turn violent.

House Speaker Mike Johnson called them “hate America rallies,” a moniker quickly picked up by other Republicans who described the No Kings protest as a crucible of potential riots representing pro-Hamas and Antifa groups. The protests were said to bring together Nazis, socialists, anarchists, and far-left elements of the Democratic Party.

Now the big question is: will this massive No Kings protest mark a new American political posture? We’ll look into that with Professor Patrick Bond to help us unpack this and more. We’ll also touch on developments in Madagascar, where the African Union has reportedly kicked Madagascar out of a contest, while the interim leader insists they’ll do their own thing.

Stay with us. We speak to Professor Patrick Bond.

Elphas: Good afternoon, Professor, and welcome back to the program.

Patrick: As-salamu alaykum, it’s wonderful to be back with you Elphas. Thank you.

Elphas: We look at the No King’s protest. It caused millions to go to protest on Saturday, suggest that the American people hate Trump even more. What does this mean now? My question is that could this mark a new American political posture?

Patrick: Well, it’s a great time to ask because on Saturday, nearly 7 million people in the U.S. were out in the streets. And this is an increase from the other No King’s Mass Protest Day. That was in mid-June. You might remember it was Donald Trump’s birthday, and he called a 250th sort of party for his army, the 250th birthday party for the U.S. Army. It was a damp squib.

The No King’s protest, in contrast, in the middle of June, really did surprise everyone because there were 2,000 separate locations. It’s a big country, about 330 million people in the United States. To get 5 million at that time and now nearly 7 million, nearly 2%, is an extraordinary achievement because it’s an apathetic society, a society so deeply divided now where you’ve got the insults that were being thrown around against the No King’s protesters, trying to relate them in some way to Hamas, in some way to extremism.

In fact, it’s a wide-ranging coalition that includes the old neoconservatives. There are a few of them, I’m sure, there. One of them is the very famous former national security adviser to Trump, John Bolton, and he hates Trump. And so that shows one of the splits within the Make America Great Again and Republican Party movement; that is, between the MAGA group and what’s called the paleoconservative ideology, and the neoconservatives. But also neoliberals, the classic Clinton administration and Obama administration Democratic Party politicos.

And then you’ve also got people who are Third Worldists, who are promoting identity politics, who are promoting the ability of the United States now to sort of decline, hopefully in a graceful way. And then you’ve also got social democrats. I would put Bernie Sanders in that category, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and someone that I hope your listeners are aware of, probably the first Muslim mayor of New York when the election is held in a couple of weeks, and that’s Zhoran Mamdani. Mamdani actually grew up in Kampala and in Cape Town before moving to the US at age seven.

And then to that network of social democrats, I would add to that, the broad left of the US, the independent left. It’s a left that I personally know because that’s where, for about 25 years of my life, I could feel comfortable. When I lived in the US, I was at university there. And it’s a very interesting period now, because that left has been down and out, partly because since around 2009, when Barack Obama took power, the independent left was systematically suppressed so that when they did support Bernie Sanders, Sanders was completely denuded of power. He was attacked by other Democrats, and Barack Obama led the attack in 2016. Then, really, Bernie Sanders should have beaten Hillary Clinton to become the nominee, and probably would have beaten Trump, so there wouldn’t have been a first term, much less a second term of Trump. And Sanders, again, was sort of pushed out from the 2020 primaries of the Democratic Party. Again, Obama’s to blame. Now, those are the kinds of things that leave the US opposition deeply divided between a neoliberal, conservative establishment wing, and those, for example, who would firmly support Palestine. The former would very actively support Israel, and that was the big split that led up, I think, to the defeat of Kamala Harris in last November’s election.

Now, here’s the most crucial point. You can keep building street protests, but the crucial power relations will be determined partly in the Congress. And so, within just over a year, a year and about two weeks, we’re going to see the next big election, which is not the presidential, but it’s the midterm election, where a third of the US Senate and all of the US House, that is, the two branches of the US Congress, the Parliament, they go up for election, and a third of the Senate, namely the Republicans, who held a pretty strong 52 to 48 lead, I say strong because it hasn’t been 50-50, and that has been fraying, but it’s been strong enough so that the Senate Republicans can defeat the Democrats, and especially with J.D. Vance, Vice President, acting as a senator, when there’s a close vote.

But secondly, the House itself, 435 members, that may shift again. It’s about an eight-seat Republican majority. So, there’s a good chance that both the House and the Senate, or even just one of them, would swing, and that would then cause huge problems for the last two years of Trump’s term. In fact, it’s so frightening for him that there’s even talk that he would somehow suspend, declare a state of emergency, create enough havoc in the next year that he wouldn’t have to have midterm elections. He could continue just to rule with his current very powerful group, which is Republican President, Republicans running the Senate and House of Representatives, and, of course, the Republican Supreme Court.

And that’s why, to avoid the protests fizzling out, perhaps the next stage is as, the Chicago mayor remarks, to actually see – what we’ve seen last week in Italy – a general strike. Everybody goes on strike, and that’s where big business begins to get nervous. It really cuts way deep, and makes the society ungovernable.

And this is in the context, don’t forget, where the whole government, with the exception of air traffic controllers and the army, the people they consider essential, are on furlough. They’re not being paid, and they’re not being allowed to come to work, because there’s a sort of a meltdown in government finance. It may be only a few more days before they’re sorted it out, but Trump has refused to compromise with Democrats, and as a result, he’s happy to see the U.S. state go into this paralysis where only the army works. And hopefully, you can get through the customs and immigration, if you’re going in and out of the U.S., but, of course, ICE, which is the immigration police, they’re working hard. That’s a part of U.S. fascism, the people who are trying to root out, particularly, Mexican immigrants.

Now, when you put it all together, it feels like a civil war situation. But we’ve just seen a very peaceful protest on Saturday. There were no arrests of any of the 7 million or so protesters. There were 22 arrests of Trump counter-demonstrators, which showed they were trying to get aggressive, and the police did arrest some pro-Trump people.

So, it’s a fascinating time, isn’t it, where you can ask the question, will the street heat of people going out to protest be enough, or will they have to withdraw their labor power on a work day, not on a Saturday? And, in fact, will they be able to do more than that by contesting for next year’s election?

But, in the period between now and then, they’re relying on the courts. They’re relying on single-issue protests. They’re making fun of Trump. Comedians are still going wild, although there’s a bit of censorship. The most popular, Stephen Colbert, had his show canceled. That’ll take effect in May. And the other most popular, Jimmy Kimmel, had his show canceled, but there was such a backlash a few weeks ago that it was put back on the air.

So, you get a sense of the society really in the, let’s say, early stages of a full civil war. The Republicans, the American male, the aggressive and sometimes racist, white, working-class male, often with a gun, well, they could probably win just by virtue of their force of arms. But Trump himself isn’t doing very well. Polls have him at between 41% and 44%, which is a very low level of popularity for a president.

And the big question, can these protests continue to mount, and will it mean a shift, perhaps, to this next generation of young leftists like Zhoran Mamdani, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has Puerto Rican heritage, like Bernie Sanders, who’s 82 years old, but really going strong, able to mass-mobilize tens of thousands at these protests. So, it’s a fascinating time. We should learn a lot from it, about the danger of a right-wing populism, that is, the Trump-MAGA, Make American Great Again movement of working-class people who go right-wing when they’re under threat.

They may become especially xenophobic, and Islamophobic, and sexist, and homophobic, transphobic. They may become very culturally reactionary. They’re taking away women’s reproductive rights, their rights on abortion. So, they’re moving quickly on the cultural front to cancel people that they don’t like, who are trying to have a more liberated lifestyle, or simply have civil rights and freedom of expression.

So, that’s what’s at stake. And I think in this country, we should learn a lot from the potential for a right-wing backlash. We’re lucky. We’ve seen very little of that, but there could well be, as we’ve seen with Operation Dubula and with the white population, who typically would be the BizNews supporters, followers of Rob Hersov and his lot.

And that may be, then, the next comparative point where Donald Trump has seen people here in South Africa, because he thinks that the whites are subject to genocide. That’s his ridiculous claim. Thank goodness he has been quiet on it recently.

But he probably would give some support, as would Steve Bannon, to those right-wing forces like Dubula in the Gauteng and, to some extent, the Durban townships, but also the rich whites who want to have an escape town, a Cape Town for their escape from the rest of South Africa. And they want to have an independent Western Cape. They won’t get it because the Constitution makes it very hard. But it’s the kind of movement you can see where whites are getting a little bit more rebellious, and you’ll see them up and around in a more aggressive way, you know, egged on by Donald Trump and the likes of Rob Hersov.

Elphas: Yeah. Now, in the main talk, in the main, what picture does this paint of the Trump administration?

Patrick: Well, it’s a mixed picture because all the promises made to his base are not coming true, with one exception, that is, he is cracking down on immigration. That is, he’s got a goal of getting rid of between 10 and 13 million people, depends on who says what, when. His main immigration official is a man called Stephen Miller, and the head of the Homeland Security, who is a former governor of one of the Western states. She’s very, very aggressive, and she bragged about shooting a puppy dog at one point.

So those folks are still going strong, and they are violating people’s rights. They are engaged in explicit racism by saying, you speak Spanish or you have brown skin, so we’re going to lock you up, and you can prove later if you’re an actual American citizen. And so that’s going on at a very rapid rate. You can just imagine trying to get rid of 10 or 15 million people in a short period of time. So that’s the most explicit way that Donald Trump has kept his campaign promise, which is that he would be very tough on immigration and undocumented workers.

But on the other promises, such as inflation, he’s failed. The inflation rate hasn’t popped up as much as people had expected because of the tariffs that were going to be coming into effect. And I think that’s one of the things where people are trying to figure out is the lack of economic activity in the real economy in the U.S., the slowdown, the lack of job creation. It’s all balanced by one huge danger, which is a huge bubble in the stock market. And those who’ve got some money in the stock market say, ‘Oh, I’m doing well because the AI, artificial intelligence stocks, are bubbling away.’

And there’s a big fear that, well, there’s nothing much underneath the kind of classic bubble that could burst any moment. That’s sort of widely understood that the New York Stock Exchange and the other stock markets, NASDAQ, are really very, very high. Like South Africa. South Africa is even more overvalued, using what’s called the Buffett Indicator, that is market capitalization of our Johannesburg Stock Exchange, divided by GDP. And the U.S. and South Africa are at very high levels.

And the bubble will affect certainly in a place like the United States, where it could pop out any time, as it’s made clear, if the Chinese are following through with the threat to ban or to restrict the rare earth materials, which are very important as minerals for some of the AI applications, for batteries, for storage, for energy-intensive activities. So let’s say that the U.S. economy stands at a point where the inflation, the price increases, haven’t come down. With the tariff increases, imported goods are going up in price. Imports from South Africa by 30% for many of our goods. For some of them, like platinum and chrome, very important imports – gold, of course – into the U.S., those imports are at a 0% rating. But some of the others, like steel, aluminum, automobiles, 25-50%, those are going to be very hard-hit. We’ve already seen huge declines in the shipments from South Africa. And then you’ll see the same with Chinese, which are also at the 30% level. Brazil and India, 50%.

Those tariffs Trump did promise to put on, but he said, we do that in a way that will create jobs. And there isn’t any evidence yet that the fact that there are high tariffs on imports means you’re going to get a lot of new investment. We haven’t seen any evidence yet. It’s a longer-term process, of course, but nobody’s saying, now because of tariffs, I’m going to set up my own factory. And so we are seeing new jobs. We are seeing the inflation numbers in a period where Trump has said, no, we’ll promise to cut prices. Well, we haven’t done that. And then the other extraordinarily dangerous thing he’s done, for example, ending USAID, which is potentially disastrous for public health, which could bounce back if there’s another pandemic like COVID.

The climate walkout, again, terribly dangerous for the U.S., which is getting hurt by climate emergencies, very, very extreme weather events. Or the destruction of the Medicaid system, because you recall a big accomplishment that Trump and his Republican Congress had a few weeks ago was to pass what he called the One Big Beautiful Bill, and that cut the corporate and elite, the top taxpayers, the richest people, cut their taxes, continuing on the Trump tax cuts from his first term. But it also cuts up to 14 million people from the medical aid system called Medicaid, and will make Medicare, that is health care for older people, much harder, because of closures of clinics in rural areas and inner city areas that depend on Medicaid, are also supposed to be helping Medicare, the older people who need state health insurance.

Now, those cuts are going to be, I think, most devastating in January, February, when they really take effect. And then we’ll, I think, see much more of a rebelliousness from within the base. And the final point to make on this, how is Trump doing? He’s lost a lot of his support, because instead of being that paleocon that I mentioned earlier, that is isolation, staying out of other people’s wars, trying not to impose democracy, as George W. Bush, his Republican predecessor, had tried to do, that is, I put democracy in scare quotes, because we know what they really wanted when they invaded Iraq, which was oil.

And so when they end their commitments in that way, as the MAGA people had expected, it may mean the need to cut back military. And that’s another major factor for what the neoconservatives, the old guard in the military industrial complex, in the State Department, had to go on the think tank media, they expect that Trump will actually continue the U.S. military struggle. And that goes with not only the bombing of Iran, that is, in June, he intervened to help Israel and to get a ceasefire between Israel and Iran by bombing some of Iran’s nuclear facilities. We don’t know how much advance warning, because the Iranians seemed to be able to get this dangerous plutonium out, before the U.S. hit two of the bases where this was being worked on, the enhanced uranium.

But then, in addition, we’ve seen Trump very aggressively engage in Ukraine, first by threatening the Ukrainian government with pulling out U.S. support, and then by pulling out support for Putin. So it’s a zigzag. And currently, after what happened on Friday, that is, Trump met with the Prime Minister of Ukraine, Volodimir Zelensky, and said, you have to accept that Putin has now captured about 20 percent of your country. You just have to accept that. And Zelensky stormed out. He was angry and he didn’t accept that. And so the question of whether Trump will continue to back Ukraine remains. But particularly, because Trump has said, India, if you keep buying Russian oil, we’re going to have this 50 percent tariff.

So the thing is very muddy when it comes to Ukraine. The only clear thing I can assure you of is that Trump is a hardcore Zionist who supports Israel down to the last bullet, and what he hopes will be the last Palestinian. And that means that as he expressed his grand vision, the Riviera of the Middle East, the land clear-away and kicking out all of the Palestinians from Gaza, that remains in the back of his mind. Now, when we saw a couple of weeks ago that Trump seemed to be doing a deal for a ceasefire, we know in retrospect, the last 10 days, there’s been no ceasefire. So what we’re seeing is Trump play everyone, make grandiose plans. He really had hoped he would win the Nobel Peace Prize about nine days ago. He didn’t do that. The Venezuelan right-wing leader did.

But the main point about all this is that Trump and Netanyahu retained their friendship, and whatever little tussle they had going back and forth, that faded away. And the fate of the Palestinians still is in question, because even though the hostages, Hamas has released them, twenty living hostages, and they are looking for the bodies of the other dead hostages, really killed by Israel’s bombing. It’s pretty clear Hamas is not ready to give up, that many of the tunnels underneath Gaza are still intact. Their weaponry is still strong. They can, if they need to, go back to fighting. The Israelis never stopped. But Hamas has put a pause. Well, they can still do a lot of damage to Israel. So we could see a restart.

But of course, the most terrible thing is that as dozens, hundreds of Palestinians die, the food shipments aren’t coming in, the potential for rebuilding, the obvious debt that Israel owes to Palestine, priceless, for killing tens and tens of thousands, many more than 60,000, we know that, maybe tens of thousands more under this rubble. But particularly that the refusal by Israel to see what we all know they should see, that is a UN resolution that Palestinians have the right to return, there should be no discrimination of Palestinians in Israel, and no further occupation of occupied Palestine. Those are the three demands made by the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement.

And I think the last point to make is, in the US, it’s still a strong movement, not nearly as strong as it was about a year and a half ago, when the college kids were out. They were intimidated in the period since. It’s a strong movement for boycott, divestment, and sanctions. But of course, we see that here in South Africa, with Colombia having stopped the coal sales, we’re the number one merchant of coal, to run 20% of Israel’s grid. It’s been the Colombian coal mines going through Glencore and the American company Drummond, and now Glencore and its partner here, African Rainbow Minerals, still being part and parcel of the supply of coal.

In fact, South Africa is now the number one coal supplier. There are three ships, two that are on the ocean right now, going from Richard’s Bay up to Hadera, one actually docked in Hadera and Ashkelon, the two main ports where coal is unloaded. One just docked in October 1. So we’re really very ashamed, I think, that South Africa hasn’t addressed the deep hypocrisy of President Ramaphosa’s brother-in-law, Patrice Motsepe, running African Rainbow Minerals, in spite of protests at his office, in spite of several protests at Glencore office.

We still haven’t got the strength today to try to correct for them supporting the Trump-Netanyahu project, that is letting Israel stand over Gaza, and powering that project with oal. Perhaps we can call that a huge hypocrisy, a huge embarrassment here. So I think we’re all implicated in this. But most importantly, I think we need to learn, like the Madagascar activists last week, like the people in Morocco the week before, Tunisia a couple of weeks before that, and Kenya, that people can write their own history and protest from below and make a new society.

Elphas: Yeah, absolutely. Prof, I think we’ll make some time just to delve much into the Madagascar. So we’re just running out of time, but hopefully we’ll make another time. I think it’s important that we touch base on the Madagascar issue. But thank you so much for your insights at this moment, Prof. I really appreciate your time.

Patrick: Always great to be here. Thank you.

Elphas: It’s a great pleasure indeed. A very big thank you there to our guest, Professor Patrick Bond, Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Political Economist at the University of Johannesburg.

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