A far right Salt Lake City car dealer’s political ambitions were halted violently and abruptly by the business end of Congolese government security force’s service rifles in the Democratic Republic of the Congo on Sunday, the Washington Examiner reports in an absolutely batshit story.
Starting from the top: 41 year-old Congolese-American Christian Malanga had arrived in Salt Lake City in the late 1990s, gained his citizenship, moved back to the DRC to join the military but returned to Utah in 2011 and started a car dealership, and became what the Examiner calls “a vocal supporter of former President Donald Trump.” Malanga founded a group he called the “New Zaire Movement” and last weekend gave it a go, assembling his son, two white American guys – one of them identified as a 36 year-old Maryland-based cannabis entrepreneur named Benjamin Reuben Zalman-Polun, and about 50 local bravos to storm the Palace of the People, the adminsitrative office of President Felix Tshisekedi at 4 AM Kinshasa time on Sunday, streaming the whole thing on Facebook.
Tshisekedi wasn’t in the building given the early hour and the fact that it’s mostly used for ceremonial purposes. Still, coups are successful in West Africa all the time – if you know what you’re doing. Malanga apparently didn’t, and government troops, authorized for the use of deadly force, used it, blasting Malanga in the palace. His son and Zalman-Poulon were arrested shortly after as they tried to jump into a boat to flee across the Congo River to Brazzaville, the neighboring capital of the Republic of the Congo (different country, but their capitals are across the river from each other).