Punditry, or the production of columns or video, taking issue or taking sides in matters of politics, economics or social affairs, is an old craft. We are sometimes generalists, sometimes experts and sometimes actual players in the games we pronounce on.
In a democracy there is no qualification for punditry — you succeed if, over time, people read or listen to you and you fail if they don’t.
The rise and rise of US President Donald Trump and of social media has had an electrifying effect on punditry. Thousands of Trump fans have joined the game, each of them a bold expert with inside knowledge. I’ve battled for a year to describe what it is they do, and I found it earlier this week.
My source is Simon Kuper, a columnist on the Financial Times. He calls it ”sanewashing” — the effort to ascribe to Trump a rational objective behind the many shocks he has delivered to the world since he took office for the second time in January last year.
There are many local examples — a leading commentator recently described how it was clearly Trump’s rational design to control his western hemisphere. Hence his attack on Venezuela and his designs on Canada and Greenland. China could have Asia, and the Russians could have Europe.
This message is delivered looking straight into the camera and keeping a straight face. I have yet to hear how launching a war on Iran fits this confident analysis.
Oil shocks
Similarly, another commentator told us recently that Trump’s war on Iran is about depriving the Chinese of Iranian oil. But he cannot explain the reasoning behind driving the price of oil beyond $100 a barrel and causing real hardship throughout the world while helping out Russia, a major oil producer struggling to sustain a war in Ukraine when it was below $70 a barrel.
A respected American historian was initially sceptical about the wild trade tariffs Trump imposed on all countries last year, only to come round a few months later when a light came on and he saw the sense of it all. Now the tariffs have been knocked down by the US Supreme Court.
The sanewashers simply can’t live with the genuinely disturbing possibility that Trump has no real idea what he is doing but is president of the US nonetheless. The war he has started in Iran, alongside Israel (which at least has a rational goal in the complete destruction of an Iran which, in turn, has for decades dedicated itself to the obliteration of Israel), has gone rapidly wrong.
Despite the loss of their aerial defences, the Iranians are more than holding their own and deliberately putting pressure on a panicky Trump by driving up the price of oil. They have taken Trump’s war to neighbouring and rich Gulf states, possibly ending their decades of growth and prosperity.
The sanewashers simply can’t live with the genuinely disturbing possibility that Trump has no real idea what he is doing but is president of the US nonetheless.
There is no obvious end to it all, and even though many pundits suggest Trump will get out of the mess he has made by simply declaring “victory” and pulling back his forces, that guarantees nothing.
Iran could continue to squeeze the oil market, and the Israelis would continue to try to finish the Iranians off while the skies are clear for them. We should be prepared for a sombre reality — this war could take months, even years. Persian history goes back millennia, and while its current leadership is despicable, Iran’s 90-million people have resistance in their blood.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, we know now, has tried for years to persuade American leaders to join an attack on Iran. It seems it was only in Trump that he found one stupid enough to agree. We should not have been surprised. Trump has little to no idea of the consequences of his actions. “He has miscalculated every aspect of the Iran attack,” reads a tweet I appreciated. “He is unprepared, thoughtless, inexperienced and compromised.”
If anything, Trump will strengthen rather than weaken the Iranian regime. A US-made Tomahawk cruise missile killed nearly 200 children aged between seven and 12 when it struck a school in the first hours of the war. Trump will never admit it was his own forces who launched it. A coward on top of it all, he takes responsibility for nothing. Ever. In a way, it’s his strength.
As for the sanewashing, it’ll expand as supporters here and elsewhere strain for reason, method and design from their hero. They’ll not ever find it, but watching the effort they put in will be interesting. It couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of people.
• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.
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