If you’re Cyril Ramaphosa, who should you be rooting for in Tuesday’s US election? Should you join your “ally”, Vladimir Putin, in keeping fingers crossed for Donald Trump? Or should you be guided by shared roots and your instinctive preference for Democrats over Republicans, and go for Kamala Harris?
Good taste and a belief in the values of liberal democracy would plead for Harris. But allow me to play advocate for the devil, the uninhibited guy who reflexively refers to Africa as an outhouse and “Congo” (which one he does not specify) as a source of Hannibal Lecter-ish immigrant hordes.
What you have to know about Trump is that in the pudding of pale flesh beneath the blue suit and red tie there is not one solitary ideological bone. He is purely transactional. His decision trees begin and end with the question: “What’s in it for me?” There is no moral core. No conscience. He cheats at golf. His appetite for adulation can never be sated. Feed it and he’s yours, at least until someone else takes his faithless fancy.
Another thing you need to know is that whatever organigram his transition team comes up with, in practice it will be the hub and spoke model that obtained the first time around, with Trump at the hub issuing instructions to whatever spoke is standing nearby. Those instructions, like as not, will be based on a suggestion he’s just had from some billionaire pal-of-the-moment.
Should he be elected, you need to get him on the phone asap to congratulate him. There’ll be quite a queue of leaders like yourself jockeying to kiss the ring, but, if you act quickly, you have a, well, trump card, assuming your New York bromance with Elon Musk was more than ships passing in the night.
Musk, his America political action committee and the hundreds of millions he pumped into it will have had a lot to do with Trump winning, so his stock should be high if he doesn’t blow it by trying to take credit. One cannot, of course, be certain that he won’t. He can be remarkably stupid on X.
Trump really hated it to be said that his first electoral triumph was down to anyone but his own extraordinary self. One doubts he’d appreciate the irony of his not being electable without foreign help, first from a Russian dictator — whose hoods are still pumping out pro-Trump provocations — and then from a once illegal immigrant from SA.
Waste time
But let’s assume Musk’s stock remains high and he gets you on the line with the new president (or president-elect — Trump has made it clear he intends to be talking to Putin and others before he’s sworn in, regardless of whether it’s legal for him to do so). What, once you’re done licking, should you tell him you’d like?
The obvious team ask would, I suppose, be for prompt renewal, with expanded benefits, of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (Agoa), or at least for Agoa-eligible countries to be exempted from the tariffs Trump has suggested he means to apply across the board. But this may be too complicated. You don’t want to have to waste time explaining Agoa. The man’s attention span is notoriously short, especially if the Adderall is wearing off and the subject of the conversation is not himself.
The risk you take in asking to be spared new tariffs is that he will ask for something in return. Some believe the chief reason he keeps banging on about tariffs is to give himself bargaining chips. Congress has yielded the president broad authority to impose tariffs at his or her own discretion, making them a perfect tool for a temperamentally autocratic shakedown artist like Trump. Nice cars you’re making. It’d be a shame if you couldn’t sell them here.
A topic that really does get his juices flowing is construction. That is, after all, his original métier and one reason he is so fixated on erecting a wall along the southern border. “Mr President”, you might say, “your name is synonymous with the world’s finest buildings. Our priority is infrastructure. We’d love to see great American companies like yours more involved in building it.” You might then throw in a line lamenting China’s disproportionate contribution to African skylines, just to pretend you’re not all in with the rival gang in Beijing.
I think you’ll get on fine with Trump should you have to. After all, he’s not altogether distinguishable from the company you keep in the Brics these days. In fact, he’d fit in quite well. He’s all for locking up, even shooting, opponents and stifling media that call him out. He has the country’s billionaire oligarchs cowed and at his beck and call. And any election that he does not win is, by his definition, illegitimate.
• Barber is a freelance journalist based in Washington.
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