What Trumps the Horrors of the South Sudanese Hellscape? The Donald

In a country like this, enmeshed in a war like this, it’s hardly surprising that ceasefires have meant little and violence has ground on even after a peace deal was signed last August.  Leer was just one of the spots where atrocities continued despite the pact that “ended” the conflict.

More recently, the war — or rather the various sub-conflicts it’s spawned, along with other armed violence — has spread to previously peaceful areas of the country.  Cattle-raiding, a long-standing cultural practice, now supercharged by modern weaponry and military-style tactics, has proven increasingly lethal to communities nationwide, and has recently even bled across the border into Ethiopia.  A South Sudanese raid into that country’s Gambela region last month killed 208 Ethiopians, and the attackers abducted 108 women and children while stealing more than 2,000 head of cattle.

While in Leer, I do end up talking at length with the Trump-intrigued aid worker about local cattle-raiding, as well as the killings, the rapes, and the widespread looting.  I was always, however, aware that, like many other foreign aid workers and locals I meet, what he really wanted was an American take on the man presently dominating U.S. politics, an explanation of the larger-than-life and stranger-than-life figure who, even in South Sudan, has the ability to suck the air out of any room.

“This Trump.  He’s a crazy man!” he tells me as we sit together beneath an obsidian sky now thick with stars.  He reminds me that he’s not authorized by his employer to speak on the record.  I nod.  Then he adds incredulously, “He says some things and you wonder: Are you going to be president?  Really?!”   

A couple of other people are around us now, eating dinner after a long, sweltering day.  They, too, join in the conversation, looking to me for answers.  I find myself at a loss.  Here, in this place of acute hunger ever-teetering on the brink of famine, here, a short walk from homes that are little more than hovels, where children go naked, women wear dresses that are essentially rags, and a mother’s dream is to lay her hands on a sheet of plastic to provide protection from the coming rains, I do my best to explain seething white male anger in America over “economic disenfranchisement,” “losing out,” and being “left behind,” over Donald Trump’s channeling of “America’s economic rage.”  I’m disgusted even articulating these sentiments after spending the day speaking to people whose suffering is as unfathomable in America as America’s wealth is unimaginable here.

Some of Leer’s women fled with their children into the nearby swamps when armed men swept in.  Imagine running blind, in the black of night, into such a swamp.  Imagine tripping, falling, losing your grip on a small child’s hand as shots ring out.  Imagine that child stumbling into water too deep for her to stand.  Imagine slapping frantically at that water, disoriented, spinning in the darkness, desperate to find a child who can’t swim, who’s slipped beneath the surface, who is suddenly gone.

And now imagine me trying to talk about the worries of Trump supporters “that their kids won’t have a chance to get ahead.” 

I really don’t want to say any more.  I don’t want to try to make sense of it or try to explain why so many Americans are so enraged at their lot and so enthralled with Donald Trump.    

The aid worker lets me off the hook with another assessment of the Republican candidate.  “Things he says, they are very awkward.  When he says those things, you think: He’s crazy.  How can he be a presidential candidate?”

How to respond? I’m at a loss.

“If he wins the election, America will not have the influence it’s had,” he says. 

Maybe that’s not such a bad thing, I counter.  Maybe not having such influence would be good for the world. 

It’s the truth.  It also completely misses the point.  Even here, even as I’m revolted by talking about America’s “problems” amid the horrors of Leer, I’m still looking at things from a distinctly American vantage point.  I’m talking about theoretically diminished U.S. power and what that might mean for the planet, but come 2017 he’s going to be out in the thick of it, in this or some other desperate place, and he’s obviously worried about what the foreign policy of Donald Trump’s America is going to mean for him, for Africa, for the world. 

I go silent.  He goes silent.  Another aid worker has been listening in, piping up intermittently between mouthfuls of rice and goat meat.  “So is he going to win?” he asks me.  

I look over at him and half-shrug.  Everyone, I say, thought Trump was going to flame out long ago.  And I stop there.  I’m too spent to talk Trump anymore.  I don’t have any answers.   

My companion looks back at me and breaks his silence.  “It can’t happen, can it?”

Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch and a fellow at the Nation Institute. An award-winning investigative journalist, he has written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Nation, and is a contributing writer for the Intercept.  His latest book is Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan.  His website is NickTurse.com. Reporting for this story was made possible through the generous support of Lannan Foundation.

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