The Trump Punch

Of all the outrageous things Donald Trump has said on his campaign for president, the one that has kept sticking in my craw has been his wanting to punch somebody in the face.
The first thought that came to me at the time was what if the person who offended him at his election rally happened to be, say, Mike Tyson. The boxer has never struck me as someone who would turn his back and walk quietly away in the event of getting struck in the face.
Or would Mr Trump have made sure, very sure, that the person he picked to punch in the face was no match for him physically? For that there is a name, one most of us know well from school-ground days.
What made his threat all the more disturbing to me was an incident it brought to mind when I myself came perilously close to getting punched in the face not by an aspirant head of state but an actual one.
It happened in the early Eighties in South Africa when resistance to the white-minority government and its apartheid policy was gaining force. The prime minister (later renamed president) was an irascible character named P W Botha.
I was the political correspondent of a newspaper in the nation’s capital of Pretoria, which required me also to deal regularly with this man called the Big Crocodile for his predatory temperament.
I on a day interrupted to ask him a question as he walked along the corridor to his office in the Union Buildings, the imposing government headquarters that overlook the city from a position high up a hill. He didn’t like my impromptu approach nor my question and lost it.
He grabbed me by the shirtfront and pushed me against the corridor’s balustrade beyond which gaped a three-story drop to a concrete slab far below. His eyes bulged, his tongue flicked, and I felt his stale breath in my face. For a few moments his fist hovered ominously in the air before he dropped it to his side, released his grip on my shirt, swung round and marched off flanked by his two hefty bodyguards.
I afterwards asked one of the security men what he would have done had his boss struck me. “I would have helped him,” the big man answered with a twinkle in the eye.
We journalists had a saying among ourselves that Botha’s bodyguards were not there to protect him from the public but to protect the public from him.
There actually was a great contradiction about the man.
He did more than anyone else in his long-ruling Nationalist party to smash its segregationist ideology and set in motion the events that turned South Africa into an all-race democracy with Nelson Mandela at the helm.
On the other hand, he presided over a state security apparatus that acted against activists opposing his regime with such brutality that it left people aghast when its excesses were revealed before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that was set up as part of the country’s transitional process.
This is where my big worry about Mr Trump’s inclination to want to punch people in the face comes in. What if, as Commander in Chief of the mighty US military, he took a dislike to some weak country and decided to, well, give it a smack? Or what if he decided to use the state-security apparatus to put some troublesome compatriots in their place?
There are many examples of such behavior on the part of heads of state. A recent one involving the US is what happened to Iraq when the supposed threat of weapons of mass destruction was used as a pretext for settling a score with Sadam Hussein, who used to himself go well beyond just punching in the face those to whom he took a dislike. Even the pugilistic Mr Trump has been lamenting the consequences of that action by the previous US administration.
A current example of a statesman who likes keeping his political opponents afraid is of course Vladimir Putin. He is given to going shirtless to show off his physique and to demonstrate his martial-art abilities.
On a bigger scale, he relished the opportunity to demonstrate Russia’s military might by simply grabbing the Crimea away from Ukraine. Like taking a smaller boy’s apple on the school grounds, it is the kind of thing a bully would do. And then he has Mr Trump as a regular admirer.
We can shrug it off as the way of the world. But here’s the thing. Technologically we have reached levels of sophistication that put people from the far corners of Earth in touch at the press of a button. We are probing ever deeper into space in search of answers to the puzzle of our existence.
Yet consideration is being given to electing as our world’s mightiest leader a man who still has the caveman instinct of wanting to physically beat up opponents. It is a man who, if successful, will be in ultimate command of a nuclear arsenal – another example of our technological prowess - that could blow us all to bits.
Electing leaders who fancy punching critics in the face just isn’t safe.