In the end, they both came away with a book. The much-heralded confrontation between SA President Cyril Ramaphosa and US President Donald Trump, which one US diplomat anticipated would be an âunmitigated disasterâ, ended up being a fairly even match.
It was absorbing, instructive, and oddly mesmerising. It was tense, too, but much more polite than I expected. The event wasnât short on theatrics: Trump ambushed Ramaphosa with recordings of the EFF's Julius Malemaâs âkill the boerâ antics; in turn, Ramaphosa ambushed Trump with SAâs golfers. (Well .. thatâs not exactly true: bringing Ernie Els and Retief Goosen was Trumpâs idea, as a kind of nod to the fact that they helped set up the meeting.)
Still, you could say that Ramaphosa chipped out of Trumpâs bunker. From Ramaphosaâs point of view, emerging from the meeting with a few diplomatic niceties constitutes a narrow kind of victory in the circumstances of the recent diplomatic fallout. As one of my colleagues pointed out, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy must be disappointed in retrospect that his country didnât have a few US Open winners on hand to help bring down the temperature.
To me, the crucial moment was when Trump was asked what it would take to convince him that there was no white genocide in SA. What then happened was truly remarkable: Ramaphosa interjected that he would answer the question for Trump - a truly inspired intervention. And, with surprising grace, Trump welcomed the intervention.
Ramaphosa went on to flaunt SAâs golfers, making the excellent point that they would hardly be present if there were a âwhite genocideâ taking place, and that he trusted Trump would believe their version of what was happening on the ground in SA.
In that moment, an odd struck me: seeing them sitting together, batting away the mediaâs fastballs and curved balls, juggling the mic so adeptly, it hit home not how different they are but how similar. In so many ways, Trump and Ramaphosa are peas in a pod.
The idea originated from a British friend who suggested that, behind the scenes, Trump and Ramaphosa probably got on famously. âAfter all, they share the same confusion about the distinction between what is public money and private benefitâ.
As the thought sprouted, the similarities became all the more clear. Both are an odd variety of business people, whose actual business acumen is somewhat dubious. Trump inherited much of his wealth, and Ramaphosa reaped his through BEE deals.
It's not that they were deficient or passive. Both have been adept in the process and have taken full advantage of their bequests, which is a skill in itself. But much of their misunderstandings about the nature of business can be traced back to their incomplete knowledge of the broader subtleties of commerce, which may be connected to their own faux involvement in business. Entrepreneurs they are not, which suggests why they are so attracted to actual entrepreneurs.
And on the subject of details, I canât say I know either well, if at all, but what I do know is they are not strong on that boring stuff. I thought it was revealing that Ramaphosa complimented Trump on his redesign of the Oval Office. He seemed genuinely impressed. All that gold. What could be more tasteful?
The fact is that both Trump and Ramaphosa worship extreme displays of wealth. In Ramaphosaâs case, it's private game farms with sofas stuffed with dollars; in Trumpâs case, it's the opulent extravagance that is Mar-a-Lago. There is a quality of theatre about them. And you donât even need to reach particularly deep into your amateur psychology textbook to guess that they are both compensating here.
Whatever you think about their politics, they have one really extraordinary skill in common: they are adept communicators, each with an uncanny ability to know exactly which buttons to push. It's that ability to confidently pull off public interactions that makes them both such successful politicians.
They do have different styles: Trump is often brash, confrontational, and his rhetoric is divisive. Ramaphosa defaults to a kind of reserved diplomacy. But both approaches are driven, I suspect, by their circumstances, with Trumpâs communication skills honed in reality television, and Ramaphosaâs as a trade union and political negotiator. They are, after all, operating in massively different circumstances. Yet, they share an instinctive sense of how to capture the public mind, which helps explain their political prominence, lasting for very long periods.
But their worst traits reveal where they are most similar: how intimately woven they are into their core constituencies, which also explains the chief cause of their conflict.
Trumpâs embrace of the idea of white oppression and the targeting of Afrikaner farmers in SA is, fairly transparently, a kind of unacknowledged nod at his largely white, male, rural base. Ramaphosaâs lack of action against the âkill the boerâ antics of the EFF and his championing of the expropriation without compensation legislation is a kind of unacknowledged nod at his largely black, male, rural base.
They are such perfect mirrors of each other, not only because of their circumstances but because both recognise something deeper: the enormous power of a sense of victimhood. And in both cases, the facts of the situation are comparatively trivial to its symbolism.
Understandably, a large portion of the SA media and commentariat plead âthe factsâ: no land has been expropriated without compensation; no targeted âgenocideâ of white farmers is taking place. All true, of course. But also irrelevant. The facts are not germane here; the sense of the facts within the core constituencies is the thing.
So, back to those books. Ramaphosa said Trump had given him a book without releasing specific details about its title or content. He did mention the book he gave to Trump: a substantial, 14-kilogram coffee-table book showcasing South Africa's golf courses.
It is just possible to be a little cynical here: As Daily Show presenter Ronny Chieng quipped, Ramaphosa, in his view, really messed that up. âYou lost him at âbookâ and you definitely lost him at âkilogramsâ,â he said. But Ramaphosa said at a briefing afterwards, âIn the end, we had a really good bilateralâ.
And you know, I think he actually meant it. And had reason to mean it. đ„
From the department of "so close" ...
Oren Hartov
From the department of "have you updated your LinkedIn profile"?...
Andrew Hutchinson
From the department of advanced, but brief, alchemy ...
Elizabeth Gibney, Nature magazine
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Tim Cohen
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