Cyril Ramaphosa stepped right into the middle of Trump’s war on democracy

Whoever heard of the business of state diplomacy being conducted over live TV? Until Donald Trump, that is. For the US president’s legacy is not the history of diplomacy but of reality TV.

Reality TV has a vivid history that began in the early 1970s, when Hollywood placed cameras in the house of the Loud family of Santa Barbara, California, and simply let them roll for six months. Six months of disaster for this so-called ordinary US family (in fact, upper middle-class, and out on a limb, for who would agree to such a proposition if not already deranged?).

Before this inaugural reality show was closed down, the father was exposed as having an affair, leading to his divorce, and one son was outed as gay. After this free-floating debacle, Hollywood realised that reality TV needed to be closely, if covertly, monitored, so that even Big Brother — the US, South African and UK versions — was closely monitored, both in terms of the choice of participants, and the editing of material.

Trump’s preparation for the US presidency took place during his years on The Apprentice, when his catchphrase was, “You’re fired!”

This is the line he essentially offered to South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa on 20 May, although courtesy of video and print journalism rather than straight from the horse’s mouth. Ramaphosa had come prepared to negotiate, bringing, among others, Ernie Els, the great South African golfer who Trump knows from his favourite (and only) sport.

The reasons for Ramaphosa’s visit were:

• The ending of Pepfar, the HIV maintenance programme put in place by President George W Bush, which had kept millions of HIV-positive South Africans alive for decades;


• The false narrative that Afrikaans farmers are undergoing genocide in a country determined to destroy whites;


• The obscene linkage of refugee status to this narrative of white vulnerability before the dark hordes; and


• Fury that South Africa launched a case of genocide against Israel in the International Court of Justice when Trump is using the myth of uncontrolled anti-Semitism at US universities as an excuse to defund university research in medicine, the sciences, the environment and inequality.

So why did this meeting take place over live TV? A clue can be found in what Trump said after he and Vice-President JD Vants (Vants being the Yiddish word for “bedbug”) humiliated President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, a country fighting for its life: “It made great TV.”

Does this mean that Trump inhabits an alternate universe where the TV screen is the only reality? Not quite, for he depends on TV for a politics in which performance outranks truth because, like all reality TV today, the format is closely controlled, disallowing time for dissent, debate and the subtlety of point of view.

When Ramaphosa tried to correct Trump on his white genocide narrative, Trump had the lights dimmed and showed EFF leader Julius Malema singing Kill the Boer. This tune has a problematical history, but there is no evidence that the EFF has linked it to any programme of genocide.

However, the US TV audience will not know that. They will take the song at face value, as proof that whites are an endangered South African species. Trump also handed out “documents” filled with false statistics about anti-white violence without allowing time for rebuttal of their evidential falsity. It was clearly prepared in advance.

It was critical that the meeting took place over TV, rather than in a quiet room, shielded from the public. This is the style and project of the Trump administration — to distort truth by systematically attacking freedom of speech and academic freedom at universities, disdaining judgments given by courts of law, and eliminating cultural institutions such as the National Endowment for the Arts.

Trump has taken his playbook not only from Elon Musk, but from Musk’s grandfather who, before he emigrated to South Africa, was the head of the Canadian branch of a US movement called Technocracy Incorporated that was sympathetic to Hitler and the Nazis.

The linkage of US news and one-sided propaganda took its current shape in the 1970s, when the Federal Communications Commission chairperson Mark Fowler repealed the Fairness Doctrine, which had required media to present contrasting sides of opinion over the airwaves. These were, in the inevitable US way, posed as Republican v Democratic, with a man speaking the Republican voice and a woman the Democratic, but they did a good deal to still propaganda.

The repeal led to the rise of Fox TV and has been grotesquely magnified by social media, where truth is every person’s right, expert or not, and is substantiated by how many websites carry the same point of view, reminding us of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s joke about the man who buys two copies of the same morning newspaper so the one can confirm the truth of the other.

Ramaphosa, master negotiator, was prepared to seriously converse with Trump about thorny issues between South Africa and the US. I believe during the lunch, which was not broadcast, he did accomplish a “reset”, as he put it, of financial issues between the two countries, and this should not be underplayed.

But when on screen, he was merely a set piece in the US fascist turn. Ramaphosa stepped into the middle of a war on the democratic culture of the United States waged from within. DM