Blink and you might miss it among the Covid-19 resurgences, debt downgrades, and grassroots support for Zuma and his henchmen.

But as we end 2020, Mzansi seems, against all odds, to be heading for a kind of closure.

In March, the Zondo Commission wraps up its long-running revelations of Gupta plots, banknotes stuffed into Louis Vuitton handbags and sacks of unused cement, slowly crumbling into the Free State soil.

And although we still can’t rule out a skebenga-in-the-hole, finish-line comeback, the decision of the ANC Integrity Committee that Secretary-General Ace Magashule should step aside from his job while he faces corruption charges is encouraging, as is the news that Zuma himself will likely be ordered by the Constitutional Court to testify.

Meanwhile, here in iMelika, tongues and keyboards are atwitter with the possibility that our own outgoing president may soon face legal charges.

Ideologically, of course, Trump and the Zuma faction of the ANC could not be more different. For arch-capitalist Trump, communist China cooked up the coronavirus, while Hugo Chavez reached back from the grave to rig American voting machines.

By contrast, at the top of Zuma’s hate list are “white monopoly capital” and “apartheid spies”.

But beneath this, the two recently dethroned figures share an awful lot: the conflation of individual and national interests; a love of conspiracy theories; a knack for spinning accountability as persecution; even a string of disturbingly similar sexual assault allegations.

Zuma’s corruption will be familiar to Daily Maverick readers, thanks to this publication’s extensive investigations. Trump’s likely prosecutable misdeeds, on the other hand, fall into five broad categories.

First is tax fraud, under investigation by New York State and audit by the federal Internal Revenue Service. Here, the controversy mostly surrounds overblown consulting fees, including some apparently paid to Ivanka Trump. The New York Times recently revealed that by claiming suspiciously sweeping expenses as losses, Trump, a billionaire, paid $750 or less in income tax for 10 of the past 15 years.

Next comes bank fraud, presently being explored by the Manhattan District Attorney. The issue here is whether Trump exaggerated his assets in an effort to get more favourable interest rates from private banks.

Third, bribery and/or campaign finance. Think of Michael Cohen, inappropriately using campaign donations from struggling Appalachian coal miners to buy the silence of porn star Stormy Daniels.

Fourth and perhaps most gravely, obstruction of justice. This was the focus of the Mueller investigation, perhaps the closest America has come to a moment comparable to the delivery of the game-changing Madonsela report on State Capture. Mueller famously failed to recommend charges against Trump, who enjoys immunity as a sitting president. But he laid out a detailed trail of evidence for either Congress or for a future Department of Justice.

Last but not least, there is a whole series of failures of government that might also constitute violations, depending on how prosecutors looked at them: possible criminal negligence, in knowingly downplaying a dangerous pandemic; child abuse or psychological torture, via the government’s policy of separating parents from children at the border; sedition when an elected leader calls for resistance against the electoral system.

In the face of such extensive rule-breaking, what might an incoming Biden/Harris administration focus on?

Biden will face constraints that will again seem deeply familiar to South Africans. Just as Ramaphosa wants to avoid dividing the ANC, so Biden will want to try to bring together a fractured nation. Just as the South African Cabinet longs to have a chance to discuss restoring jobs and fixing education rather than rehashing the horrors of the Zuma era, so Biden fears having his administration defined by his predecessor.

Such large-scale public investigations seem essential, given both the gravity of the administration’s abuses and the disturbing track record of Obama’s “forward-looking” policy in relation to the Bush Administration’s torture programmes.

Like Ramaphosa, Biden will have to respond to counter-accusations, well-grounded or not: in his case, that as vice-president he abused his office to protect his son Hunter.

Both leaders seem committed to having decisions about investigations and prosecutions made by their independent prosecutorial units — the National Prosecuting Authority and the Justice Department.

At the time of writing, Biden’s likeliest pick for attorney-general seems to be Doug Jones, the former Alabama senator who unseated accused paedophile Roy Moore in 2017. As state attorney general in the 1990s, Jones developed a reputation for toughness, indicting right-wing abortion clinic bomber Eric Rudolph and four Ku Klux Klan members who bombed a Birmingham church in 1963.

If Jones is confirmed, expect the likelihood of government probes to increase.

On the other hand, if a more conciliatory figure like Merrick Garland is chosen — Obama’s doomed Supreme Court nominee — then assume that only the most dramatic and clear-cut instances of wrongdoing will be on the table.

Commissions of inquiry can, obviously, be appointed by people other than the attorney general. For example, the 9/11 Commission, which exposed lack of vision and miscommunication among America’s security agencies, was jointly established by the president and Congress.

Such large-scale public investigations seem essential, given both the gravity of the administration’s abuses and the disturbing track record of Obama’s “forward-looking” policy in relation to the Bush Administration’s torture programmes.

However, such truth commissions also seem a long shot. Both Trump’s 2019 impeachment for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, and his exoneration in the Senate, went along party-line votes. Given that the Republicans look favoured to hold on to the Senate in the pending run-off elections, it is hard to imagine the branches of government uniting as they did after 9/11 in an effort to uncover the truth.

Instead, the likeliest scenario is simply that Trump will continue to face fraud charges in his home state and city, albeit with leaked tax returns.

At the federal level, too, the most dramatic development may simply be that a new administration will, by law, have access to vast numbers of documents that may reveal further horrors.

If some of these, too, are leaked to investigative journalists, what stories will we be reading in 2021? How many callous jokes about refugee orphans? How many more requests to foreign dictators to help the president’s re-election?

The Trump years may have been characterised by a creeping authoritarianism, but as in South Africa, the US press seems as free and vigorous as it has ever been. Trump and Zuma may be able to manipulate division, but the facts about both leaders are already largely visible. One suspects that, even if our countries’ respective judicial systems struggle to reach clear verdicts, future historians will not be conflicted. DM

Glen Retief’s The Jack Bank: A Memoir of a South African Childhood, won a Lambda Literary Award. He teaches creative nonfiction at Susquehanna University. He writes here in his personal capacity.