“Trump derangement syndrome” is a political condition whose etymology is traced to the late conservative commentator and psychiatrist Charles Krauthammer.
He defined it, first in respect of another Republican president, George W. Bush, as “the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency – nay – the very existence of [the President]”.
Early Monday morning here, both these symptoms and many local sufferers of the pathology were in overdrive.
First, Trump famously posted on Truth Social, “South Africa is confiscating land and treating certain classes of people VERY BADLY” and then threatened to cut off all aid to the country pending “a full investigation into the situation”.
This he followed up with a few seconds on topic at the foot of his presidential plane that “South Africa’s leadership is doing some terrible things, some horrible things”.
Unsurprising
Thus far, beyond the cut-off, universally, of US aid for the interim period, no deeds or acts from the White House have followed this social media and airport announcement flurry. This of course, should Trump ever get round to it, is no inoculation that some deeds won’t – at an indeterminate date – follow his words.
This is hardly surprising since SA is a minnow – in terms of trade, location, and influence – for the US. Far closer to home for Trump and his administration are Mexico and Canada.
Over the weekend, Trump announced that he was imposing swingeing 25% tariffs on both countries (and 10% tariffs on Chinese imports).
By Monday, the same day Trump’s derangement hit these shores and the rand, the White House had whipsawed. Following telephone conversations (and various assurances), it was announced that tariffs on Canada and Mexico had been ‘paused for at least thirty days’.
More of a boomerang than a bazooka since tariffs act as a tax, increasing the cost of imported goods and disrupting the highly integrated North American supply chain economies, the situation simply underlined the wild unpredictability of Trump Mark II.
As the Wall Street Journal, both impeccably conservative and vehemently in favour of free trade (in the best conservative tradition) editorialised:
But couched within the relief expressed by the Journal for this pause, came the sombre warning which echoes way beyond North America right down here on the southern shores of Africa.
Brutal, transactional, and unpredictable are three of the milder adjectives which attach to the powerful and mercurial US president, now in office, amassing power and unbothered about the need for re-election.
The South African government offered at least two widely divergent responses to Trump’s threat to this country.
President Cyril Ramaphosa stated that the Expropriation Act, presumed cause for Trump’s comments, was not about “confiscating land” and offered to explain the country’s respect for both constitutionalism and the rule of law. However, while Ramaphosa was vehement in credentialing his constitutionalism, he was conspicuously silent on the racial bias and prescriptions of a welter of government policies on which Trump touched.
Far more explicit on the topic was Trump whisperer, former South African Elon Musk. He offered one line in response to Ramaphosa’s defence: “Why do you have openly racist ownership laws?”
There was no answer on this, since it is unanswerable. Though of course the back story here is as well known as it is both depressing and entirely self-defeating. Musk wants to bring his Starlink broadband by satellite service to the country. It operates in Botswana, Mozambique and even Zimbabwe.
Our immediate neighbours, recognising the need for their digitally deprived citizens to be served by cheap broadband access, placed no requirement on the company to give up 30% of its equity to black companies, or “an equity equivalent’. This is the regime of “pro investment”, “pro-growth”, “pro upliftment” South Africa.
No immediate signs of change, hence the Musk post on X. On the same day, unbothered by the remarks of his own president on the topic, Minister of Minerals and Petroleum Resources Gwede Mantashe, in response to the threat by Trump to cut the funds which have provided SA (especially its Aids victims, via Pepfar, with over $8 billion in funds over a decade) basically told Trump to stick it.
He told an audience at the Mining Indaba:
That one sentence provides further proof, if any more were needed, quite why SA mining is in the dire straits, languishing near the bottom of the international tables, where Mantashe has plummeted it.
The US does not obtain our minerals for nothing, our exports are entirely determined by international pricing and have nothing to do with foreign aid. In any event, with the US one of our top 10 minerals’ export markets, one wonders why Mantashe imagines how an export embargo would advantage South Africa?
And as the recent crisis in the eastern Congo has proven, with Rwanda president Paul Kagame (more sinner than saint on topic) branding Ramaphosa a ‘liar’ there is no unified African approach on any international topic these days, let alone in the region where South Africa once dominated.
Perhaps the best direction of the chill winds blowing our way from the new administration in Washington was not in the public realm but in the telephone diplomacy of new US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio. He made 39 calls to his foreign counterparts in his first week in office.
Six were to African foreign ministers or heads of state: Kenya, Morocco, DRC, Algeria, Egypt and Rwanda.
South Africa did not make the cut.
One of the reasons, it is suggested, for our declining influence with Washington is the implacable stance SA has adopted in opposition to significant allies of the US (such as Israel) and the cosseting of its enemies such as Iran, China, Cuba and Russia. There is a long trail.
When Ebrahim Rasool returned last month as SA Ambassador to the US, he – no fan of Israel – suggested it was time for South Africa to tone down its megaphone diplomacy on Gaza.
Cakeism
Yet only last Friday, South Africa joined a ragtag alliance of countries, all with zero influence on the Middle East, such as Honduras, Bolivia, Belize and Cuba, inaugurating “the Hague Group” to press further for the end of Israeli occupation and mandating an arms embargo on the country. This just three days before Trump was to receive his first foreign visitor, the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu.
So, just in case the new US administration had forgotten quite where SA located itself in the world, here was a reminder.
Joel Pollak – who once served as my speech writer and today is tipped as possible US Ambassador to SA, described the group as formed to “oppose Israel, support terror”.
We can sum this all up not so much as the tower of Babel masquerading as foreign policy, but rather as that other well-known political pathology: “Cakeism” first attributed to former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson. He once quipped: “My policy on cake is pro having it and pro eating it”.
Thus, according to Mantashe, we love the donations (Pepfar et al) but hate the donor (the US). According to Rasool, we are removing our megaphone until we decide to crank up its volume. In Ramaphosa’s version, we are pro-Constitutionalism and non-racialism, but we still insist that foreign investors deliver 30% of their equity, or its equivalent, to meet racial targets here.
We are, in other words, pro-foreign investment, but insist that investors fund racial redress. If you are at the centre of the world, as indeed Trump is, then you can be very demanding or whipsaw with dizzying inconsistency and still maintain the unending engagement, or fear, of all nations.
South Africa though is not the number one country in the world, it is just 36th in economic size and constitutes less than 1% of the global GDP. Our army cannot even credibly engage in effective “peacekeeping” operations as the tragic events in eastern Congo last week revealed.
Where we were – in 1994 – at the centre of world attention, today we don’t get on the call sheet of the top 40 or so countries phoned by the new administration in Washington. Our regional supremacy, once unquestioned, has been dented, perhaps irreparably.
These are the facts and statistics of the matter. As Jean Francois Revel noted: “My function here is not to be optimistic or pessimistic. I am stating the case. It is the case that is pessimistic. Not the person stating it.”
But wise statesmen and women, acknowledge the facts and adjust policy to meet new and urgent circumstances. Do we have any is perhaps the most urgent question of all.