Donald Trump, returning in triumph to the scene of crimes for which he would otherwise be facing trial, will today for the second time put his hand on a Bible and swear with a straight face to “preserve, protect and defend the constitution of the US”.
If his record persuades you he is serious about that oath, he has a pretty bridge across New York’s East River he’d like to sell you to go with the fake $2 bills, “Victory” cologne, gold sneakers, Chinese-made “God Bless the USA” Bibles, and other tat he’s been peddling as part of his nonstop grift.
So America’s 45th and 47th president is a terrible human being. Who knew? Last November, 77-million Americans disagreed or couldn’t care. To quote Elon Musk’s favourite bit of Latin, vox populi, vox dei (the voice of the people is the voice of God).
It is what it is. And now to business. What does his return mean for SA? Truthfully, I don’t know and I am not sure anyone does at this stage. No-one is working harder than newly arrived SA ambassador Ebrahim Rasool to find, and if possible influence, the answer.
Consider first the policy-making environment. It promises to be unusual and not exactly what the founding fathers had in mind when they drafted the document Trump is pledging to defend. For the next two years at least the federal government looks to be Republican, in both the polity and partisan senses, in name only. In practice it will be medievally monarchical: King Don calling the shots through his family members, barons and courtiers.
Today’s Republican Party did not create him. He created it. Its members, from House of Representatives speaker Mike Johnson on down, do what they’re told. If they don’t, they’re done. With the Silicon Valley broligarchs and much of the rest of corporate America filling his coffers on bended, and in many cases trembling, knees, Trump can credibly threaten to remove any Republican he doesn’t like. He can have Musk whip up mobs against them on X. He can have his picks for attorney-general and FBI director turn his enemies’ lives and finances upside down.
That’s bad for democracy but not necessarily for SA as its ambassador seeks to parry the many knives that are out for it here. It would just take one orange nod for all the blades to be sheathed, even those wielded by the Israel-can-do-no-wrong crowd, who are putting it about that Rasool is a closet terrorist. Of course, it would only take another such nod for SA to be tariffed out of the US market altogether.
SA’s trade privileges under the African Growth & Opportunity Act are in the crosshairs because its foreign policy, and the company it is seen to keep, betrays a certain contempt, if not outright hostility, towards US interests and friends, as broadly defined by the establishment elite, aka the party-transcending purple blob.
Inasmuch as Trump has a mission beyond revenge, self-preservation and personal enrichment, it is to purge the blob and its ways of thinking about the world, and perhaps in the process win a Nobel peace prize for sorting out the Middle East and Ukraine through unconventional diplomacy.
As New York Times columnist Bret Stephens put it after Trump golf buddy and property developer Steve Witkoff brought Benjamin Netanyahu to heel on a Gaza ceasefire: “Trump is going to scramble traditional foreign policy assumptions.” He has certainly done that with his Dada-esque talk of recolonising Panama, buying Greenland and absorbing Canada.
His national security adviser, Mike Waltz, who is moving to the White House from a seat in Congress and is no Henry Kissinger, calls this “Monroe Doctrine 2.0”, a reference to president James Monroe’s 1823 assertion that the New World was henceforth America’s world and the Old World must keep its hands off.
Is Trump genuinely signalling he wants to work towards a new (or, more accurately, 19th-century) global order, carving up a multipolar world into great power spheres of influence, respecting Russia’s right, if not to re-annex then at least to have a big say in, its former empire and “near abroad”, and China’s right to do the same vis-à-vis Taiwan?
Perhaps we’ll learn more from the inaugural address. Where, one wonders, would Africa fit in such a scheme, lacking as it does consensus on a home-grown great power? If we’re turning the clock back, how about Scramble for Africa 2.0? In which case Trump and his barons might want to keep SA sweet. We’re worth scrambling for.
• Barber is a freelance journalist based in Washington.
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