Every day since his inauguration Donald Trump has ventured into new territory with a series of executive orders designed to usher in his vision for the US presidency. When he was a novice president in 2017, with little understanding of the political swamps and bureaucratic mirages of Washington, Trump found his agenda frustrated by the range of checks on his power that reduced him to something far less imperialistic than he had envisioned.
His approach then was to pronounce on a vision and then seek to find out who was responsible for executing on that mandate. Naturally, many of those in positions of authority were creatures of habit and protocol, and would embark on lengthy, lethargic processes that left a president who lacks the patience of old-school politics increasingly frustrated.
His hyperbolic stance on all things that elevate his profile means that in any situation he pronounces with far more ambition than pragmatism as a matter of habit. When reality intervenes and he has to tone down the rhetoric, he simply finds another hyperbolic pronouncement to make on the spot and keep his bandwagon of sound bites moving along.
The lessons learnt in his first term scarred him enough to inform a bold approach to implementation in his second term. Executive orders, which are as close to a presidential fiat as one can get, have become the primary instrument to translate the hyperbole into something tangible and impossible to ignore.
Under this model the hyperbolic and paranoid utterances of a man wounded by the past and eager to remodel and repurpose the state for generations immediately enter the accelerated pathway to reality, as none of the remaining bureaucrats can ignore an executive order.
Rather, a belated process of trying to make sense of it all is promised, with little indication of what happens when facts eventually arrive to trump the hyperbole. Regarding the suspension of USAID programmes globally, the order was all-encompassing, and only when the granular details of what the programme actually does was explained was common sense invited into the room. A series of exemptions granted to mitigate the worst effects of indiscriminate executive orders followed.
In theory, the 90-day investigation period would enable everyone to understand what the programme was all about and whether it warranted the use of American taxpayer resources. But when the institution is decimated and its bureaucratic layer reduced to a skeleton, it is unclear what an investigation would yield except to reinforce predetermined conclusions.
For SA the perils of rhetoric and orders predating investigations has been acutely damaging. In Trump’s utterances SA is apparently engaged in some “very bad” things, including the confiscation of private property and a white minority that happens to speak Afrikaans in effect facing genocide.
Trump has signed an executive order aimed at punishing the SA state for a range of mythical crimes and allegiances, and offering asylum to besieged Afrikaners. The problem is that none of it stands up to scrutiny, and the chief purveyors of the genocide theory — AfriForum and Solidarity — have bizarrely turned down the offer of resettlement.
The problem with the US is that it is an elephant that is too big to ignore. SA must, therefore, work out whether it can engage in any meaningful diplomatic overtures aimed at manufacturing a convergence between facts and hyperbole, even though those with power lack the patience for engagement with facts and have a habit of using hyperbole and lies to settle long-standing political scores.
If the SA diplomatic mission succeeds the country will once again emerge as champions of pragmatism in a chaotic world. If not, the next four years will be a case study in living through diplomatic chaos in a world of negotiable facts.
• Sithole is an accountant, academic and activist.
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