The Memo: Zelensky 2.0? Trump's ambush of Ramaphosa caters to MAGA base

Yahoo

22-05-2025

President Trump for the second time used a meeting with a major foreign leader to cater to his own base on Wednesday.
This time it was South African President Cyril Ramaphosa who Trump used as a foil, just as he and Vice President Vance had hammered on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office in late February.
The Ramaphosa meeting was not quite so stormy as the confrontation with Zelensky, which made instant global headlines. But it had plenty of tension. And it appeared just as much of a preplanned ambush, especially when Trump asked for the lights in the Oval Office to be lowered so he could show a video of incendiary remarks from South African politicians.
Trump referred to the speeches as coming from 'officials,' a term that could be taken to imply the speakers were members of Ramaphosa's government. They are not, as both the South African president and his agriculture minister, who was also present, sought to make clear.
Still, Trump seemed undeterred by those points, continuing to insist that the situation in South Africa is akin to an anti-white apartheid and that people who kill white farmers enjoy de facto immunity.
Ramaphosa and his colleagues tried as best as they could to push back on those assertions without getting into a Zelensky-style, flat-out argument with the U.S. president. They acknowledged that high levels of violence are a problem in South Africa but countered suggestions that there was a government-endorsed 'white genocide,' a claim that has become popular on the U.S. online right in particular.
The Associated Press characterized any claim of 'systematic' killings of white farmers in South Africa as 'baseless.' South African crime statistics for 2024 indicate that less than 1 percent of nationwide murders were on farms.
Trump has taken particular exception to the recent passage of a law that enables expropriation of land. But the law is subject to judicial review, and Ramaphosa countered Trump by emphasizing that the U.S. federal government also enjoys a right to take over private property under eminent domain.
Still, the broader political reality is that Trump used the meeting with the South African president to amplify a narrative that he has pushed domestically.
In general terms, his framing is that, whatever racial injustices existed in the past, it is white people who now face unfair discrimination, in part because of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.
Trump appears to believe that institutions that endorse DEI goals are guilty of reverse racism.
The idea that 'white farmers … feel they're going to die in South Africa' — another claim made by the president on Wednesday — dovetails neatly with that argument.
In the same way, the meeting with Zelensky in late February seemed designed to cast the Ukrainian president as an ingrate and to lay the groundwork for a withdrawal, or at least significant reduction, of U.S. aid as Kyiv tries to rebuff the Russian invasion that began in February 2022.
Whether such moves work, from a domestic political perspective, is a whole other question.
As with so much else in relation to Trump, the episodes may simply break down along the usual deeply polarized lines.
There will, to be sure, be plenty of members of Trump's base who will see the president's treatment of Ramaphosa as justified, and who will fully endorse his related attacks on the media for purportedly not wanting to cover the story of contemporary South Africa through the same lens as he himself sees it.
But there will be others who recoil from the apparent attempt to humiliate a Black South African president by appealing to white American racial grievance.
This mirrors the division that emerged following the Zelensky showdown, where the MAGA base applauded the excoriation of the Ukrainian president while liberals — and traditional conservatives who remain deeply skeptical of Russian President Vladimir Putin — cringed.
The stakes may not be quite so high in the case of South Africa. But the nation's politics do at least have salience in the American news agenda because of the Trump administration's decision to recently admit a group of Afrikaners — white South Africans, primarily farmers and their families — as refugees.
That decision drew accusations of racism from liberal commentators, who contrasted Trump's apparent generosity to the Afrikaners with his outright suspension of the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program by executive order on his first day back in office
There are other contentious elements to the U.S.-South Africa relationship, too, including South Africa's case at the International Court of Justice, alleging genocide by Israel in its assault on Gaza. Trump, uncharacteristically, responded in a relatively mild fashion to a question from a reporter on that topic as Ramaphosa sat beside him on Wednesday.
The treatment of Ramaphosa, like that of Zelensky, will surely give foreign leaders who have been in Trump's sights some pause for thought if they get their White House invites in due course.
For the moment, however, the South African president emerged relatively unscathed even as Trump sought to use the encounter as aggressively as possible.
The Memo is a reported column by Niall Stanage.
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