Politics: Decoding Donald Trump’s popularity
Liberal western democracies are pondering four more years of Donald Trump, US president, with furrowed brows. The rest of the world, though, is greeting him with open arms. In a European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) survey, more than four in five Indians—many of them in the midst of a torrid love affair with their own authoritarian—think Trump will be good for India as well as the US. The Republican enjoys startling, if not quite as scintillating, support among other nations too. A majority of citizens in Saudi Arabia, Russia, Brazil and Turkey believe Trump will be good for the US; nearly half believe he’ll also benefit their respective countries.
More than two-thirds of the 1,500 Singaporeans surveyed separately also believe Trump will be good for Singapore. The support is fairly consistent across age groups, and strongest (78 percent) amongst those aged 50-59. “I can only speculate that the sentiment may have to do with a perception that it is possible to ‘do business’ with Trump and that Trump may be ‘good for business,’” Ja Ian Chong, political scientist at the National University of Singapore told the South China Morning Post. Experts’ worries about the impact of proposed tariffs have clearly not percolated among the lay folks. Rather than keeling over, could Singapore’s economy do swimmingly well in the next four years?
What then of the coarsening of public discourse, the desecration of progressive values? Surely the young—passionate, idealistic, less touched by pragmatism—unanimously dislike Trump? Not so. Of Singaporeans aged 21-24, 51 percent of women view him favourably—as do a whopping 72 percent of men. Perhaps some young men, insecure about greater competition from women, and unmoored by changing mores, have found safe harbour in the patriarchal version of masculinity that the Trump movement proffers. A few may have been drawn to outright misogyny. (Much of the East Asian “manosphere” celebrated his win.)
Maybe this lurch towards authoritarianism is simply part of the cycle of human affairs. Maybe progressive movements have failed to deliver on their promise of justice and equity for far too long. Maybe their shibboleths—gender equality, minority protection, environmental ethics—are not sacred for most. Maybe they have failed to articulate them well enough. Or maybe, distracted by the deluge of misinformation, the better angels of our nature have deserted us. Jom fikir.
Society: Increase in hoarding and shoplifting an individual or societal condition?
It was a tragic start to 2025 for a family living in Hougang, after a fire ripped through their five-room HDB flat, killing all three residents on 9th January. Firefighters had reportedly encountered problems getting into the cluttered flat. As police investigate what caused the fatal blaze, neighbours have described the family as hoarders. Hoarding, defined as “an excessive acquisition of objects and inability to discard or part with possessions”, can increase the risks of: mental distress; falls due to the obstruction; as well as fire hazards and pest infestations, affecting not just occupants but their neighbours too. To tackle an increase in hoarding cases here, Singapore launched the New Environment Action Team—a multi-agency effort consisting of 28 members from the public, private and people sectors—with the hope it’ll better coordinate hoarding management efforts.
Authorities are monitoring some 630 severe cases of hoarding. More than half, 357, remain unresolved (potential hoarders who refuse to grant access to the G) up from 253 in December 2021. They warn that the problem may worsen due to the country’s ageing population. Social service agencies tasked with managing the issues of hoarding face various challenges, including frequently encountering resistance from residents suspected of hoarding behaviour. It’s also a massive undertaking to declutter a home and to prevent a recurrence—one that’s labour-intensive; often relying on volunteers, as well as families and the community to spot signs of hoarding, and to intervene early (with patience and compassion), seeking professional help where necessary.
Hoarding is prevalent amongst about two percent of the population here, similar to global figures. Studies have shown that the condition occurs evenly among women and men; three times as often in older adults than in the general population; and typically in people who live alone. The American Psychiatric Association classified hoarding as a distinct mental disorder in 2013, having previously listed it as a symptom of obsessive compulsive disorder, although not all cases are pathological. Besides mental health reasons, hoarding has been attributed to feelings of social alienation, trauma or grief. More broadly, it can benefit us as a nation to ask whether the rise in hoarding cases, and incidentally, shoplifting, may be symptomatic of a deepening societal malaise—one perhaps at the intersection of overconsumption, status competition, social inequalities and shrinking apartment sizes.
History weekly by Faris Joraimi
Last week, at Sydney’s Royal Botanic Garden and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden (BBG), related species of “corpse-flowers” bloomed mere days from each other. Thousands rushed to behold these growths, which are not flowers, but inflorescences (flower heads). They open once every several years. When they do, the “blooming event” lasts only 24 to 36 hours, releasing a powerful stench likened to rotting fish, rubbish and carrion. The rarity of these bloomings almost makes them historic signs, like the appearance of a comet. Drawing crowds at two distant ends of the earth, the corpse-flowers in both gardens belong to species of Amorphophallus endemic to our region, specifically the island of Sumatra. This is where another famous, evil-smelling plant—Rafflesia arnoldii—was “discovered” by French and British naturalists, with the help of local guides. (An unnamed Malay servant found the specimen that Stamford Raffles and Joseph Arnold described.)
Living near the BBG, I had to see its blooming Amorphophallus gigas, called anturbung in Batak, kerubut or bunga bangkai in Malay and Indonesian. This specimen grew from a seedling BBG acquired from Malaysia in 2018, a link in history straddling the Malacca Straits. I joined the two-hour queue outside the temperature-controlled conservatory. Why did we bother? Online, comments taunted those seeking an audience with these stately, stinking sprouts: another inane “trend” chased by people with short attention spans. But I’m glad curiosity still gets the better of us; life on our planet continues to surprise and amuse. The experience is akin to a mass performance event that includes the long, orderly wait to see a plant whose scientific name means “misshapen penis” in Latin. The huge A. titanum (seen in Sydney) has a regal inflorescence with a maroon spathe housing a protruding spadix (the “penis”), as depicted in this illustration. Brooklyn’s A. gigas, though less dramatic, perches on a stem. In other specimens, it often towers above humans. When my turn came, the spadix had collapsed, and I caught only a faint whiff of its smell. But it still looked science-fictional, our volcanic archipelago maintaining its enchantments.
Johannes Teijsmann, the botanist who first described A. gigas in 1862, also introduced the oil palm to Indonesia, which now ravages Sumatra’s ancient rainforests. Briefly, his description takes us back there: “in the place that it chooses as its favourite habitat, it provides a change in that silent nature that cannot be but pleasant. In dark forests, in the shade and under the dripping of the trees, in places that are almost always covered with a mist by the exhalation of the ground, while rarely a sunbeam penetrates, here it grows with a flower stem of almost 2.5 metres in height, like a giantess among her herbaceous sisters.” Some “trends” are windows to a distant past.
Arts: Rest in peace, Jonathan Lim.
“Sibling fun at the beach,” Jonathan Lim posted a photo of himself on a breakwater with his two younger sisters, grinning widely against a gloomy horizon. “Feeling sunny despite the rain!” That was the theatre-maker’s final digital dispatch before his unexpected death, age 50, last week. The playwright, director and actor leaves behind an outsized body of work in Singaporean satire, where he frequently roasted local politics and current affairs over the open fire of his long-running “Chestnuts” revue—and transformed familiar fables like “Sleeping Beauty”, “Aladdin” and “A Christmas Carol” into deliciously high-camp and deliberately low-brow pantomimes, now a staple in Wild Rice’s annual theatre season. Lim was a one-man “Saturday Night Live”, often at his best in the short-form musical format or when he could put together a series of pithy vignettes, each devoted to pulling apart a specific subject. Here, he could set loose his zany, associative imagination within a strict narrative structure. He also deployed this gift in other settings; the gender equality non-profit AWARE regularly invited Lim to be part of its annual fundraising ball under the “Chestnuts” banner, where the team would skewer the most shocking incidents of sexism in the nation-state. In the 2020 edition, Cyndi Lauper’s feminist anthem “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” and Extreme’s saccharine ballad “More Than Words” are woven into a madcap musical medley about the gender pay gap in Singapore. “Girls just want the same funds!” the quartet belts, “More than words, it’s salaries that really make it real!”
Lim also relished the historical and the supernatural, and worked closely with The Theatre Practice to write its sprawling, ambitious promenade show, “Four Horse Road”. Audience members wandered through alleyways and buildings on Waterloo Street and encountered real-life stories from the area’s past, reimagined. “Jon was one of a kind: quirky, mischievous, imaginative, curious and a hell of a writer, who could not refuse a good creative challenge,” Kuo Jian Hong, the company’s artistic director, told The Straits Times (ST). “He found humour in heavy subjects, and profundity in the ridiculous.” The two long-time collaborators were in the midst of conjuring up a new Chinese-language musical, “Partial Eclipse of the Heart”, set to premiere in August.
Kuo wasn’t the only one left to grieve in Lim’s abrupt wake. His death shocked peers and protégés alike, who took to posting long eulogies on social media, often accompanied by dozens of photographs of a beaming Lim, palpably kinetic in every frame. Friends and family told ST “there had been no outward sign of illness” before he was discovered, unconscious, in his flat by a close friend. The Singapore theatre scene has over the past few years been shaken by the untimely deaths of several thespians, including Timothy Nga, aged 49, Paul Ko, aged 23, and more recently, Shahid Nasheer, who was 28. Lim’s departure leaves yet another crater in a close-knit community, but also leaves behind a community of artists coming into their own, whose artistic sensibilities and directorial visions he helped nurture.
Tech: The US Likee(s) Singapore-based short form video app
TikTok’s future in the US remains uncertain amidst heightened scrutiny of its possible links to the Chinese state. Sensing an opening, other companies are lining up to give users their daily dopamine hit. Among them is Likee, a Singapore-based short-form video app. Likee has posted remarkable numbers in the US recently: a 143 percent spike in downloads and a 37 percent rise in user activity from 17th to 18th January. With features reminiscent of TikTok, its AI-powered video feed and engaging editing tools have resonated with consumers seeking new platforms.
Originally launched under BIGO Technology in 2014, Likee has predominantly catered to markets outside the US thus far, with millions of users across South-east Asia, India and Russia drawn to the app’s integration with BIGO’s social networking platform, alongside its community engagement approach. It was the seventh-most non-gaming app downloaded in 2019. It employs over 4,000 employees with more than 1,000 of them in China. The fact that it’s headquartered here, employing just over 100 people, strategically positions Likee to sidestep geopolitical tensions faced by Chinese-owned apps like TikTok, offering an edge in Western markets concerned with privacy and security. In the past, the company has rebuffed data requests from the Chinese Ministry of State Security on the grounds that the data belongs to its American entity. If the Trump administration continues the US hardline approach towards TikTok, Likee is well-positioned to build on its recent exponential growth in the country.
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