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Donald Trump is trying to do a Sam Goldwyn

Wednesday February 22 2017

I have always admired a man whom I never met but whose genius at communication was matched by few. Samuel (Sam) Goldwyn was a Jewish Polish refugee who escaped the Nazi Holocaust, beat all sorts of odds as he travelled across Europe till he got to England, and then crossed over to America and greatness.

His initial is the G in the MGM movie brand alongside Louis B. Mayer, his partner. Sam never got proper schooling, and his grasp of the English language was sketchy. But that did not deter the enterprising young man from manipulating that very language to beautiful advantage, and some of his quotes have become legendary.

When Sam heard there was a big society party to which he was not invited, he would call the host or hostess and ask them whether it was true they had a party coming. When they answered in the affirmative, he would then say, “Okay, please include me out.”

Goldwynspeak quotes have become famous over time and they show a brilliant sense of humour that Sam might have invented to conceal his linguistic deficit, and it worked.

“An oral contract isn’t worth the paper it’s written on,” he would quip. Or, “If Roosevelt were alive today he would turn over in his grave.” Or, “Give me another three years and I’ll make that actress an overnight success.”

An oxymoron is a figure of speech in which two conflicting ideas are juxtaposed, suggesting harmony instead of contradiction, and Sam was one for oxymoronic hyperbole.

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He died rich and famous, and had millions of fans, among whom please exclude me in.

But he died too early (1970s) for him to have met Donald Trump as a politician.

However, Trump and his crowd are surely borrowing whole pages from Goldwyn’s book to conceal something they are uncomfortable with.

Like the sacking of the national security advisor, for instance. We are told Gen Michael Flynn was fired because he misled his bosses over his contacts with the Russians, and at the same time we are told that he is a wonderful man destroyed by the media. There are two alternative facts in there, and I suppose the idea is for each one of us to take the one we prefer.

Then along comes “Bibi” Netanyahu, and Trump is eager to show he is a world statesman. So, in a press conference he deals with the two-state solution, which posits basically the existence of a Palestinian state alongside an Israeli state.

Trump, it turns out, supports whatever the two will agree on, which should mean that he will support a two-state solution or a one-state solution depending on what the Israelis and Palestinians will agree on... Your average high school pupil knows that a one-state approach cannot be a Palestinian solution, while a two-state solution has to be rammed down Israeli throats, at least as long as “Bibi” and his hawks are on the scene.

We shall have time enough to sample some more of this doublespeak by Trump as legislators delve into Russiagate, which could be the name given to the scandal surrounding all the president’s men involved in shady negotiations with the Kremlin and Vladimir Putin’s agents.

How much is likely to be discovered in the proposed probe we do not know at the moment.

But I tend to recall that this is the way the Watergate scandal unfolded, after the 1972 elections in which an abrasive Richard Nixon won.

Within two years, a creeping investigation into undercover activities undertaken on behalf of the president had laid him bare.

A book on president Nixon by Richard Reeves chronicles in detail what really happened in the Nixon White House, especially the leaks from the FBI, the same security apparatus that Trump is railing about.

For some time, Nixon struggled with just what to do with this leaker of info and the damage that info was causing.

Soon it was too late. A young presidential aide, John Dean, is quoted as telling Nixon, “I think that there is a cancer within — close to the presidency — that is growing. It’s growing daily. It’s compounding, it grows geometrically now, because it compounds itself...”

The rest, as they say, is history. Trump may want to look for alternative facts, but those facts could turn out to be just factual alternatives.

Jenerali Ulimwengu is chairman of the board of the Raia Mwema newspaper and an advocate of the High Court in Dar es Salaam. E-mail: [email protected]

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