Illustrative Image: US President Donald Trump. (Photo: Jim Lo Scalzo / EPA) | US flag curtain. (Image: Freepik) | TV. (Image: Freepik) | Jeffrey Epstein. (Photo: Florida Department of Law Enforcement / Getty Images) 
We are living in an age of “great uncertainty”, we are often told, and there is an entire conference industry now devoted to that subject.
There are even indices to track uncertainty, with an excellent website devoted to that matter. Its main show is the Economic Policy Index (EPU), but there are other indices on the site, including the Trade Policy Uncertainty Index, the Monetary Policy Index and the Climate Policy Uncertainty Index.
One unifying theme here is “policy uncertainty”. But there is a root cause to all this uncertainty, and it is hiding in plain sight.
It can be summed up in one word: madness. And I mean of the stark, raving, frothing-at-the-mouth, bug-eyed kind.
The global body politic is going right off its rocker, howling at the moon like some demented wolf on an acid trip. Scientists speak of the current geological phase of the Earth’s history as the Anthropocene, which speaks bluntly to humanity’s impact on the environment.
The Anthropocene can also be broken down into eras, and right now it is descending into the “Madocene”.
Just look at the utter insanity that is Trump 2.0.
US Republicans are celebrating a massive tax hike on the middle class — which is what US President Donald Trump’s tariffs are — and pretending they are something else against all evidence and the most basic grasp of economics or history.
Denial of reality
It’s the denial of reality that is so troubling. I’m no shrink, but when you start denying what you see with your own eyes, I take it as a clinical sign of insanity.
Trump and his “policies” and politics are the most obvious manifestation of this insanity.
The 6 January 2021 coup attempt at the US Capitol was a “peaceful protest” by patriots attempting to nip a stolen election in the bud. Never mind that 174 police officers were injured, five people died as a result, and that there is no evidence of a rigged election.
There’s nothing to see here folks, and so we have Trump 2.0 — tariffs imposed on islands only inhabited by penguins, tariffs raised and lowered, tariffs today but not tomorrow — an endless cycle of madness and mayhem amid threats to annex Canada and Greenland.
Part of Trump’s base — the QAnon crowd — for years hyped the conspiracy theory that prominent Democrats were involved in a cabal of Satanic cannibalistic paedophiles.
The files around notorious sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein — who reportedly killed himself in prison in 2019 — were a red rag for this lot. And suddenly there is nothing to see there!
Even Trump’s gullible base is not buying that, and so we now have a situation where the president of the US is losing political capital with one of his key crazy constituencies against the background of mounting suspicions — Trump and Epstein were pals — that he is in those files in a disturbing kind of way.
The attempts to distract from all of this have included allegations that former US president Barack Obama committed treason because of his murky role in the “Russiagate hoax” — which, as David Graham at The Atlantic notes, is not a hoax.
We are in an age in which the US president — who spouts crazy stuff all the time — is trying to hide the spoor of his relationship with a paedophile who would make the Vatican blush by accusing a former president of treason — a crime that Trump himself demonstrably committed on 6 January 2021.
Trump last week fired the Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Erika McEntarfer, claiming that the latest jobs data report was “rigged” to make him look bad. Trump wants to manipulate the numbers and will probably appoint a minion to do so, which will undermine the credibility of crucial US data that moves global markets.
The US president is also gunning for Federal Reserve Chairperson Jerome Powell because he has been reluctant to lower interest rates, in part because of the inflationary impact of Trump’s tariffs. And he has said that nominees for the 12-member Federal Open Market Committee that sets US monetary policy will be litmus tested — if they won’t lower rates, they won’t get the job.
For markets, this assault on central bank independence and statistical agencies in the world’s most important economy is baie mal.
We’ve also seen the denial of science on the vaccine and climate change fronts even as the fossil fuels uncorked by the Anthropocene continue to burn our planet.
To sum up, Trump 2.0 is madness on steroids.
And the zaniness does not end there. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s three-day war in Ukraine is well into its third year with no end in sight, and no goal beyond paranoid delusions about Nato’s borders — as if Latvia was a threat to Russia.
North Korea remains a nuclear-armed madhouse, and the people of Gaza face genocide and starvation. I’m sure Trump still has the hope he floated a few months ago of turning the strip into a beachfront stripper zone. Can’t let a little genocide and starvation get in the way of the new Ibiza!
In Afghanistan, the Taliban are back baby, and those dudes are pretty bonkers.
Meanwhile, here in the lovable loony bin called South Africa, the daily headlines are a reminder of our plunge off the deep end under a political mutant called the Government of National Unity. Just take Pieter-Louis Myburgh’s takedown of the Independent Development Trust CEO and spokesperson after they offered him R60,000 in cash to quash a probe.
That is, among other things, downright crazy.
There are pockets of political sanity out there. Mark Carney, the prime minister of my native Canada, is a wooden central banker who speaks in complete sentences. How boringly sane!
But there is lunacy galore out there.
So I propose that a Madness Index could supplement the Uncertainty Index.
I’m open to suggestions on this front. But I think it should perhaps be linked to, say, the price of gold, which has reached insane levels as it is an asset that thrives on madness.
It could go something along these lines — a graph that since about 2016 has soared in an increasingly vertical fashion from “Oupa had too much brandy” to “wow, that’s kind of nuts” to “straight-jacket” levels and then “batshit crazy”.
Where it goes beyond there is worth pondering. Maybe the “bat-excrement” phase could be a wide range that might peak in 30 to 50 years time. Or maybe the bat-excrement hitting the AI-powered fan could mark the next stage of this collective acid trip.
From there, I guess we’re off to Mars with Elon Musk. DM
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