So now we know. Never take a golfer to a bun fight. Hell, don’t even take two golfers and a billionaire golfer to a dumb fight. Cyril Ramaphosa should have guessed he was going to be ambushed by Donald Trump.
No amount of verbal wrestling with the EFF or anyone in parliament, as Ramaphosa’s spokesperson Vincent Magwenya suggested, could save him from the same treatment Zelensky suffered when he visited the White House: “Parliament has given him a crash course on how to deal with publicly awkward situations.”
It was more a car crash than a crash course. The orange man-child is a television whore, his presidency a stage-managed gorge fest for broadcast ratings. “Turn your lights down low”, sang Bob Marley in his 1977 song to a woman he was trying to bed. Trump turned his lights down low and bedded Ramaphosa with a video nasty. Not everyone bought it, not those who check facts, at least.
“Trump ambushes SA president with video and false claims of anti-white racism,” reported The Guardian. “Trump confronts SA’s Ramaphosa with false claims of white genocide,” was the take from Reuters. “World leaders have a huge new problem: Trump’s Oval Office smackdowns,” wrote Stephen Collinson for CNN.
‘Cage matches
“It’s the new Hunger Games of world politics — the televised Oval Office takedown by President Donald Trump. [Ramaphosa] was the latest leader to become a Maga prop Wednesday, as Trump lectured him on false claims that white SA farmers are the victims of a white genocide. Foreign leaders now enter the hallowed lair of the US president — who runs press conferences like they’re WWE cage matches — at their peril.”
To his credit, Ramaphosa remained calm and put on a bemused look rather than call out the Make Apartheid Great Again propaganda. He turned to Ernie Els and Retief Goosen who, as the New York Times noted in a headline: “South African golfers went to White House to defuse tension. It didn’t work.”
“As Mr Ramaphosa repeatedly tried to debunk the claims, Mr Trump dug in. Eventually he turned to the golfers — Ernie Els, the former world No 1 golfer, and Retief Goosen, a two-time US Open champion — to break the tension.
“Mr Els pulled out his passport as he described himself as a ‘proud South African’ and then invoked Nelson Mandela’s calls for unity in his country. ‘I know there was a lot of anger through the transition, there was a lot of stuff happening in the apartheid days. We grew up in the apartheid era, but I don’t think two wrongs make a right'.”
Els has played golf with Trump on occasion, the first time in 2017 when Trump was first in the Oval Office. “We didn’t talk politics because I’m not a man who can cast a vote,” Els told the Associated Press in 2017. “Whether you agree or not, I felt it was a duty to play with the president when you get the call. It’s basically honouring what the US has done for me and my family.”
I don’t quite get that reasoning, but, as Johann Rupert said this week, Els was the main driver behind setting up the meeting with Fanta Face and, well, SA needs the US more than the US needs SA.
Thousands will suffer and possibly die after Pumpkin Head and Elon Muskrat stopped aid to the country. To paraphrase the late actor George Wendt, who played as Norm in Cheers: “It’s a dog-eat-dog world and SA is wearing Milk Bone underwear.”
Trump and Gary Player are mates. Player received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2020, the first international athlete to be so awarded.
“Was receiving this award from a known racist so valuable to you?” asked Narendh Ganesh in an open letter to Player published in the Witness then. Player was invited to attend the meeting with Ramaphosa, but he is getting on and also has a new American girlfriend. Trump asked Ramaphosa why Player wasn’t there during the Wednesday ambush.
According to the New York Times, Player influenced Trump’s attitude towards white Afrikaners.
“When Mr Trump raised the issue of white farmers in the Situation Room, Mr Bolton recalled that the president, while practising his swing with Mr Player, had heard that the Afrikaners were being ‘driven from their land’. Two other former administration officials also said Mr Trump had heard about the struggle of Afrikaners from Mr Player.”
Perhaps President Ramaphosa should have taken three golfers to the dumb fight.
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