Notes on the Trump-Ramaphosa White Riot

Eight quick thoughts on a ritual humiliation tableau, and the long game

1.

As predicted, Trump subjected Ramaphosa to a barrage of ritual humiliation, centered on the lie of “white genocide” in South Africa. It was always going to be this way, though the thing about ritual humiliation is that both parties understand they’re in a theatrical performance, and, like pro-wrestling, nobody is really hurt. Trump had no use for this meeting other than for the domestic political opportunity it afforded him to grandstand over the “white genocide” fable. Did Ramaphosa effectively repudiate the Big Lie? No. (It’s not about reality in South Africa, remember - see point 2). He tried to offer dignified disputation of the claims or change the subject to trade, but it wasn’t possible because Trump was never going to engage in good faith. His lies, like pro-wrestling, are immune to fact-checking – the facts are not the point. Trump on camera is 100% theater, not serious engagement, debate or conversation in which the interlocutor is treated with respect: The interlocutor is there as a prop for the Trump performance. A visitor — like Canada’s Mark Carney — with a domestic political mandate and the clout to push back hard can sometimes disrupt the performance: Ramaphosa couldn’t do that, because he arrived as the supplicant, begging Trump to restore the status quo ante, which meant antagonizing his host (by, say, politely disputing each lie) was a non-starter.

2.

Did Ramaphosa and his team imagine a face-to-face meeting could “reset” the U.S.-S.A. relationship of the neoliberal heyday? If so, that would have been naïve. Trump took the meeting as an opportunity to perform a fantasy of holding his guest to account for an illusory “white genocide”. Of course this fable has been widely discredited, but that doesn’t matter to Trump: It’s purpose has nothing to do with South African reality; it’s a product of his own domestic political narrative, in which any moves towards redress for the legacy of America’s foundational racism are deemed a deadly threat to his white nationalist base. South Africa is simply a fairytale to scare white Americans about the genocidal horror that awaits on the path of DEI.

3.

Whiteness was the winner. Ramaphosa – hailed in some quarters a tactical genius for bringing along at least three random, wealthy white South African friends of Trump (tycoon Jan Rupert, and golfers Ernie Els and Retief Goosen – the odious Gary Player couldn’t make it) in the hope that their presence would neutralize the “white genocide” fiction. To the (quite ambivalent) extent to which they did this, their presence and voices also overshadowed those of Ramaphosa himself. And Trump’s disdainful body language when COSATU head Zingiswa Losi spoke was an eloquent reminder of the baas-skap in the room. (Trump will not be corrected by a Black woman. Or man, for that matter.) Ramaphosa effectively relied on three random white men of no governmental standing, and whose interests are hardly those of the majority of South Africans, to establish his bona fides with Trump. The U.S. president joked and engaged with them, and it felt that between them they had more time on the floor than Ramaphosa himself, who had to smile politely through not only Trump’s torrent of falsehoods, but also such curiosities as Els thanking Trump for U.S. support for the apartheid regime’s illegal invasion of Angola. Billionaire Rupert was effectively tapped as adjudicator of legitimacy in South African politics, which can’t be healthy. It was a conversation centered on whiteness; whiteness was the key credential for being believable in the way this whole encounter was set up on both sides. Whiteness is the coin of the realm for Trump, but Ramaphosa deploying it via his rich friends hardly restrained his lying host. What would Malcolm X have said? (Of course, Malcom never ran a struggling economy with millions of Black lives dependent on securing investment from anywhere, so that may not be a fair question.)

4.

If the South Africans imagined this was a serious engagement with the issues over which Trump has harangued them, that would have signaled an unfortunate naivete. It’s a long-established principle that most of what happens in front of the White House press corps is theater — when American journalists started firing questions about NY Attorney General Tish James and about a Qatari 747 gifted to Trump, I was reminded of the first time the U.S. media grilled Bill Clinton about Monica Lewinsky: It was in the same room, and he was hosting a visit from Yasser Arafat, looking nonplussed as Clinton talked not about Oslo, but about the whether or not he had “had sex with that woman”. Welcome to America. Trump has simply doubled down on the presser as theater, and himself as auteur.

5.

Trump Kremlinology side note: Are Israel and its champions in Trump’s dog box? It’s quite widely assumed that one of the reasons Trump is punishing South Africa is its attempts to hold Israel accountable under international law for the (U.S.-enabled) genocide in Gaza. So it was quite remarkable that when asked directly what he expects of South Africa in respect of the ICJ case, Trump shrugged and said he expected nothing to change, and he’d wait for the court’s verdict. (The U.S. by bipartisan consensus has little time for international law, and has enforced sanctions against international jurists.) And while Cold Warrior-in-chief Marco Rubio was berating South Africa as a stooge of China, Iran, Hamas etc in the Senate this week, Trump raised none of these red herrings. Just the white-nationalist ones. Is he pissed at Netanyahu? Or simply annoyed with the most ardently Zionist faction in his camp who’ve been berating him over the gift from Qatar?

6.

Did Ramaphosa hold his own? That’s a moot question, possibly even an unimportant one. When you’ve voluntarily walked into a tableau over which you have no control and in which you’re cast as responsible for an invented “genocide” and have no option but to suck up whatever is hurled at you because you can’t afford a breakdown, what does success look like? It could have been worse; he remained dignified and graceful in the face of blatant lies. It could also perhaps have been marginally better, if he’d more forcefully repudiated some of the crap, but his goal was to talk trade and opportunity. I guess I’d rate his performance a 6, which is probably the ceiling of what was possible in this mug’s game.

7.

The future: Has anything changed for the better as a result of this visit? Not that we can see, so far. Perhaps they broke new ground on trade? Depends what was on offer. Any concessions to Elon Musk over Starlink will be pocketed, for sure, but Musk is on his way out of a central role in Trump world. The reasons that AGOA may not be renewed are not specific to South Africa. The G20? Again, it may have little to do with South Africa — so far Trump has shown zero appetite for multilateralism. It’s clear that the multilateral world will have to survive without U.S. buy-in.

8.

The big picture for South Africa, like most of the Global South, requires adjusting to a new global order in which U.S. power, narrowly nationalist and mercantile-transactional, is decentered — and offers limited prospects for progress. Its best long-term prospects lie in the strengthening of economic and geopolitical ties across the Global South. But there’s no binary switch here; it’ll take years to strengthen these ties. So, in that schema, Ramaphosa eating humble pie at Trump’s table could be (but also may not be) a kind of holding move, limiting the short-term damage as far as is possible, to buy time to develop alternatives. Hopefully, though, before the Trump Show, he was on the phone with Lula and Xi, Claudia Sheinbaum and Modi, and others in a similar predicament. And hopefully his travel schedule with take him to their capitals and more in the months and years ahead. There is plenty of life beyond the White House TV studio.