Tony Leon explores the unpredictable dynamics and potential outcomes of Wednesday’s high-stakes Oval Office meeting between Donald Trump and Cyril Ramaphosa, examining political tensions, personal chemistry, and the challenges both leaders bring to the table.

The great question for Wednesday is which Donald J Trump will show up for his meeting with Cyril Ramaphosa? The second “known unknown” is which Ramaphosa will pitch when the two presidents meet in the Oval Office?

The choice and possibilities, in each and both cases, offer a range of options.

At the Franschhoek Literary Festival this weekend, a discussion at the News24 breakfast between authors Adekeye Adebajo and David McWilliams offered the idea that Trump sees himself as an emperor presiding over a court. Courtiers need to flatter the king, kiss his ring, offer blandishments and baubles to propitiate and conciliate.

Since Ramaphosa hardly has a Qatari $400m jet to offer, perhaps his best bid for the golf-mad president is a letter from Johann Rupert pledging to rebrand Leopard Creek as Trump Kruger Park International golf course.

But jokes aside, the author with a lot of insight into Trump and Trumpworld is US writer Michael Wolff, foremost chronicler of the Trump era. His recent bestseller, All or Nothing: How Trump recaptured America, bristles with insider insights, salacious gossip and some real intel.

Beside requiring total loyalty from his own coterie, Wolff shows that the only category of person for whom Trump has real regard are dollar billionaires and central casting blondes channelled to him first via Fox News and far-right TV channels. The extraordinary rise of once-obscure Natalie Harp from conspiracy-mongering One America News Network to her current desk just outside the Oval Office is one of the more remarkable tales.

Since no one in the Ramaphosa entourage heading to the Oval Office on Wednesday afternoon comports to either category, the showdown will depend largely on the personal chemistry, or its lack, between the two leaders.

Here, another insight from the weekend FLF breakfast is probably as good as any in determining the outcome of Wednesday’s White House pow-wow.

“It will depend on which side of the bed Trump wakes up on Wednesday,” offered Adebajo. Indeed, will Ramaphosa be received as Ukraine’s Zelensky (angry pit bull snarling and bullying from Trump and his circle)? Or will it be the full Mark Carney and Keir Starmer purring pussycat treatment?

 

Personal dynamics 

Readers will recall that both leaders got the charm and not the snarl in their recent White House encounters. Though it helped Starmer that he arrived brandishing an invite to Buckingham Palace from King Charles; and in Carney’s case, it helps that Canada is the US’s largest export market whose daily trade with its giant neighbour ($2.7 billion) equals one-tenth of SA-US annual trade.

Part of the problem for the world right now is that personal, sometimes psychological dynamics atop the White House are often as good an explainer for the essential unpredictability of any summit or meet and greet with the most powerful man on the planet. Where normally a “working visit”, as the Trump-Ramaphosa encounter is termed, would be preceded by months of staff planning and careful scripting, apparently Wednesday’s event was settled in a phone call last week, absent much else.

So what precisely does Ramaphosa bring to the table, or awkwardly, given the Phala Phala event, the couch where the meeting will be conducted?

 

Ramaphosa’s disadvantages 

He starts with severe disadvantages: South Africa has been placed in the crosshairs of Trump and called out for exemplary presidential attention and executive orders, as well as policies and practices that Ramaphosa might finesse but cannot abandon. These include the International Court of Justice case against Israel, the BEE and employment equity regulations (a particular anathema to Trumpworld’s detestation of DEI or diversity, equity and inclusion), and our alliance with China and Iran. (Russia is less of an issue as Zelensky has learnt to his disadvantage). And maddeningly, for Trump, we run a trade surplus with the US.

Then there is the whole minefield of the “Afrikaner refugee” saga.

As the New York Times reported recently, Trump, who is famously inattentive to matters great and small, has been fixated on the claim that Afrikaner farmers have been “a persecuted minority group being displaced from their land” since at least May 2019. And this intel is not gossip. It came directly from Trump’s national security advisor, John Bolton. And as the Times notes, “Years later, Mr Trump’s views on white farmers in South Africa are shaping US foreign policy in his second term.” Indeed, as the first airlift of Afrikaners on a refugee programme now extended to all South African minorities attests.

 

Carefully scripted rebuttals 

No doubt Ramaphosa and his team will offer careful and scripted rebuttals of the “white genocide” and “some horrible things happening in South Africa” claims.

But will it cut through? Once again, Bolton offers the view that Trump learnt first that Afrikaners “were being driven from their land” while practising his golf swing with Gary Player”. Player is quoted in the same article as denying this: “I have not even once spoken to Mr Trump about US policies in South Africa. I’m a big Trump fan, but I can’t get involved in politics.”

Whether or not Trump picked up his view on the golf course or mangled together a range of ideas offered by his key advisors who originate from here (Elon Musk, David Sacks and Peter Thiel) and detest the ANC doesn’t matter much. He has an idee fixe, and even the wiles and charms of Ramaphosa might be hard-pressed to displace it. For long after Ramaphosa leaves the portico of the White House, Trump whisperers (and loudspeakers) such as Tucker Carlson are unlikely to adjust their script or turn down the volume.

Maybe some concessions on trade and a commitment from Trump to rescue South Africa’s G20 showcase by attending its summit in Johannesburg will be the best outcome from the meeting.

And however well-prepared Ramaphosa is for Trump, he is woefully ill-prepared for the bear pit reception which, unavoidably for him, awaits him once opening remarks conclude. There will be a swarm of journalists and newscasters also attending the meeting.

During my weekend interview at Franschhoek with polymath local jurist and broadcaster Dennis Davis, Davis lamented that for years he had been unavailingly attempting to interview Ramaphosa for his television show, Judge for Yourself.

Ramaphosa does not like probing or any other form of media interrogation; Trump revels in them. As one cynic noted, Trump might not be a particularly successful businessman with his serial bankruptcies, but his television show The Apprentice made him TV’s idea of a business mogul.

Too often, Ramaphosa does not think fast on his feet or offers a clumsy defence of policy and practice, which undermines his carefully concocted image as either a business-friendly reformer or a reconciler in the Mandela mode.

Rest assured, each journalist at the White House on Wednesday -particularly the right-wing media mavens who now predominate its media pool, will go to the meeting armed with comments and statements which could prove awkward to defend or rebut.

 

‘Cowards’

It was Ramaphosa himself who only last week branded the Afrikaner beneficiaries of Trump’s refugee programme “cowards”. This disparagement of his own people who left his country sits ill from a president who swore to uphold a Constitution which promises freedom of movement as much as it does free expression.

Then there was the whopper – or two – from the president’s spokesperson, Vincent Magwenya. Acknowledging substantive differences between the US and South African approaches to Israel and the Middle East, he advised News24 that SA favoured a two-state solution (Israel and Palestine) and had no relationship at all with terror group Hamas.

It does not take much archival digging to rebut both propositions. Just days before the 2024 election here, Ramaphosa said in his rally speech “Palestine will be free from the River [Jordan] to the [Mediterranean] sea”. While Ramaphosa may say the chant is a call for the freedom of the Palestinians, others believe it means there can only be one state, and it isn’t Israel. And of course, just days after the 7 October massacre, foreign minister Naledi Pandor was on the phone to Hamas leadership, who soon enough visited South Africa.

Then there was the curious depiction of Ramaphosa himself while in West Africa recently to brand the entire white population here as “colonisers”.

This too, was widely reported and much discussed. Doubtless he can elaborate on it at the White House.

Was the term “coloniser” like “coward” a slip of the tongue or a window into his true feelings for someone – unlike his White House host – who is both famous but utterly enigmatic?

A local business leader here – whose enlightenment is matched by hard-edged realism sent me a note the other day on CR’s latest verbal infelicities.

“I am starting to think that the project of each post-apartheid administration has been to wrestle power, privilege and resources from the ‘colonisers’…doing so by threading the needle of enough social and economic stability to keep the ship SA still afloat, but as much extraction from the colonisers as possible. I am starting to think that CR is the most dangerous of the lot as he has a mask of gravitas and sophistication. But just watch his actions [NHI, BELA, EWC] and listen when the mask slips.”

It will be fascinating to see later which Trump and, as pointedly, which Ramaphosa show up at the Oval Office. And as Trump would say, “It will be great for television, great ratings.” So, stay tuned.