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Daily Maverick
2 days ago
- Politics
- Daily Maverick
Tony Leon's new book delivers an insider's account of South African and global politics and personalities
Tony Leon's new book contains fascinating observations about previous foreign and South African leaders and their successes and failures. It also offers insider views on the negotiations to achieve the Government of National Unity. The book reads just like he would sound in a congenial conversation over dinner. We meet over coffee, just before Tony Leon goes to speak at the memorial service for his long-time friend and political colleague Douglas Gibson. At that service, Leon said of Gibson, in speaking of their party, post-1994, that: 'Reduced to just seven MPs and three senators, each of us had to juggle dozens of competing roles. His included chairman of the Federal Council, chief whip, spokesman on Justice and Transport and member of the rules committee. In navigating the revival of our party, Douglas was my essential partner and my closest collaborator, and in the snake pit of politics we forged a durable and deep friendship for which I am so deeply grateful.' His comments regarding his long-time friend's life and works highlight Leon's political trajectory as well. Even if some think Leon was too in-your-face for the politics of the new South Africa, (a political life that, to be fair, is pretty hard-knuckle) he deserves credit for helping set his party on its journey to being South Africa's official opposition, instead of being the marginal political force that it was, back in 1994. The party is now the second largest partner in the Government of National Unity, the second multiparty government since 1994 and in the first days of the country's racially integrated politics. We quickly get on to the business of speaking about his new book, Being There, and his thinking about the current and future challenges of South Africa's political and economic landscape. I remind him that we first met at a mutual friend's home over dinner in the years before the 1994 election. Back then, he was a junior parliamentarian and I was working at the US embassy, trying, like every diplomat assigned to this country, to gauge its rapidly changing political texture and what it would mean for the future. As a backbencher MP, Leon's reputation was as a new, bold — and even arrogant, for some — politician. Back then, it seemed he had crisp, definitive answers for every challenge. If he still has answers for many questions, he has also been tempered by a lifetime in politics. For those who may not remember, Leon was a member of the Progressive Party through its various iterations as it became, successively, the Progressive Federal Party, the Democratic Party and eventually the Democratic Alliance, or DA. Along the way, he may be best remembered as the face of a feisty party that once campaigned on the slogan, 'Fight Back!' For some, while that was read as a pushback against the new, all-race, democratic dispensation in South Africa, Leon would certainly have insisted, au contraire, it was a principled, succinct protest against the growing corruption, the lack of effective government administration and policing, and floundering efforts to build a strong economy and nurture job creation. But that is now old news. We have all moved on. Youngish elder Leaving Parliament, Leon served as South Africa's ambassador to Argentina — on behalf of an ANC government, nogal. More recently, he has moved away from government service and joined the corporate world. But earlier this year, the DA was poised to become a key element of the new Government of National Unity (GNU), as the ANC's faltering lock on national politics and the electorate had made one-party government impossible to maintain. His old party then called on Leon as a youngish elder to be a leading participant in the negotiations over the formation of that GNU. His description of those efforts comprises a significant portion of his new book. Leon believes the DA is becoming increasingly well-placed to position itself, in the future, as the core party of a new political landscape, as the governing party or leader of a coalition of like-minded political groups beyond the current political landscape. The first section of his book delivers insights about the lives and careers of several Middle Eastern leaders, including Yasser Arafat, Ariel Sharon and Shimon Peres (and, by contrast, the actions of the current Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Palestinian Authority leader, Mahmoud Abbas). There is also a more expansive essay on the essential nature and requisites of leadership — or the lack of it, nowadays. As Leon writes towards the end of Being There: 'In many ways, we inhabit — in the true sense — a leaderless world. Mostly, our leaders are either pedestrian placeholders or titanic ego-driven populists who use high office as an engine for self-enrichment or as an instrument of revenge against enemies, real or perceived. The Peronists in Argentina, the Zumas in South Africa, the Trumps in America and the Netanyahus in Israel — all are political grifters who set one section of society against the other. They weaponise differences and grievances, ride roughshod over rules and respect for others, and hijack public institutions for personal ends.' Leon's thoughts about populism ring about right, especially his thoughts over what he terms 'cakeism' — the appeal of would-be populist leaders and their promises that can destroy an economy. (Cue those apocryphal remarks of the queen of France about bread versus cake.) It seems entirely reasonable that such views were strengthened as he observed the glowing embers of Peronism when he was South Africa's ambassador in Argentina. Collectively, thoughts like these can easily be read as a critique of the current leaders in the Middle East. The second part of the book plays off Jesse Unruh's crisp summing up of the inevitable mix of money and politics: 'Money is the mother's milk of politics.' Unruh was a major figure in California state politics for decades, and he is on target, although there are occasionally other nutritional elements in that mix as well. (My favourite novel of politics is Robert Penn Warren's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel All the King's Men. There, Warren added the inevitability of sex as the third leg of the political triangle along with money and the temptations of power, although Leon left that third element out of his equation.) In this section, several chapters recount his fraught fundraising experiences for his party — especially since in the early days of the new dispensation, the Progressive Party/PFP/DP/DA was a minnow in a smallish pond that was also inhabited by a large shark. Another chapter includes a dissection of the public saga of Ronnie Kasrils, an approach that may have been encouraged by Kasrils' cheerleading for the Hamas militants in their 7 October 2023 attack on southern Israel. (Leon's spouse is Israeli-born born and Kasrils' language clearly infuriated Leon.) As Leon tells it, through the years of the South African liberation struggle, in exile, Kasrils had quietly been receiving a retainer from his brother-in-law, a prominent businessman in South Africa. But after Kasrils' comments on the 7 October massacre, that tap closed. Revenge, they say, is a dish best served cold, and so it has been served. Complex negotiations For many readers — those interested in the negotiations for the birthing of the GNU, and even more so, commentators and historians of South Africa's contemporary politics — Leon's detailed description of the complex negotiations between the ANC and the DA, together with some other parties leading to the formation of the GNU will be of genuine interest. Leon kept a diary throughout this entire engagement, and almost 100 pages of his book form a narrative built on those diary entries. In the future, it will be an important source for evaluations of those negotiations. Leon's recollections will be read together with those of all the others who participated in the negotiations, after they write their versions. The remaining pages of Being There include short essays on the successes and failures of FW de Klerk, Mangosuthu Buthelezi and Nelson Mandela. There is also a series of more personal reminiscences, labelled by the author as The Nostos. These include a deconstruction of the false charge that Leon's father had been responsible for sentencing the ANC operative Solomon Mahlangu to death years ago. In particular, Leon's experiences as an ambassador in Argentina during the desperate days in that country's last (so far) Peronista regime are particularly interesting, as Leon positions them as a cautionary tale of what happens when a country augers towards the ground economically and politically. Of special interest to this reader (because of his own experiences) were Leon's non-specialist but trenchant observations on Japan after visiting there. Japan has surmounted its World War 2 experience (and managed to put much of the resulting horrors aside), even as it continues to embrace many ancient traditions together with its contemporary political and economic policies designed for the benefit of a majority of its citizens. Beyond the book, our conversation also covered other topics, key among them being the current difficulties between the US and South Africa. I ask Leon who he thinks should be South Africa's ambassador to the US, or, perhaps, what kind of person should they be? Leon observes that the ambassadorial role has been diminished over the years (the recent presidents' meeting had no ambassadors present from either nation, as would usually have been the case in a meeting between two national presidents). Beyond the traditional diplomatic roles, more and more, Leon says, the job of an ambassador is to be their country's chief salesperson, instead of one of those old-style diplomats. Any new South African ambassador assigned to Washington will have a difficult policy to sell, especially given the two countries' Middle East positions. A key question now is that the Trumpian dog whistle to its Maga constituents is over DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) and, by extension, over South Africa's Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment policies. Speculating in the immediate wake of the presidential meeting, he notes that the approach of a possible equity equivalent for Starlink operations in South Africa may lead to changing the discussion. (Of course, crime is something that is always in the air in any discussions about South Africa, and it came up in that presidents' meeting as well. It was instructive, per Leon, that rebuttals about crime in that meeting came from a white South African billionaire.) We turn to the often-repeated accusation that the DA has a problem with black leaders. Leon responds that it is unfair to call every black leader's departure from DA leadership roles a failure of black leadership in the party. People leave political bodies for many reasons. However, he adds that the party needs to make it easier and more enticing for expatriated South Africans to return to the country and make real contributions. What of the DA's future? Leon says he is most interested in matters of policy rather than party management, as he is no longer an officer-holder. He believes that by being in the GNU, the DA has improved its legitimacy and prospects with many people. Its participation in the GNU has made it more 'kosher,' so to speak, and it may well gain further traction. He thinks that if the DA can maintain this trend, it will grow even as the ANC continues to make further reversals in support. The key question, of course, is how he views South Africa's future. Leon argues that most countries, except for places like Afghanistan or Sudan, don't explode or disintegrate. He acknowledges that there still is a lot of ruin in South Africa, but citizen action is stepping forward wherever it can. Taken as a whole, Leon seems cautiously optimistic about the country's future prospects, regardless of its current problems and its challenges. DM
Yahoo
28-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
More Americans say Trump has been transparent about his health compared to Biden: poll
More Americans say President Trump has been transparent about his health compared to former President Biden, according to a new poll. The YouGov/Economist poll published Tuesday shows 42 percent of U.S. adults said they believe Trump has been open about his health while 31 percent said the same of Biden. Overall, 61 percent of adults said Biden was 'not very or not at all transparent' about his health, while 46 percent said the same of Trump. Nine percent said they were unsure how transparent Biden was about his health and 12 percent were unsure how transparent Trump has been. Views are polarized when broken down by party. Seventy-eight percent of Republicans said Trump has been transparent about his health while 14 percent of Democrats agreed. Meanwhile, 53 percent of Democrats said Biden was honest about his health; 14 percent of Republicans agreed. Presidential fitness standards have become a topic of discussion as Democratic insiders have come forward in multiple recent books alleging officials and allies around Biden helped cover up the then-president's cognitive decline and took extra steps to help him navigate travel, speeches and other duties. The Hill's Amie Parnes and NBC News's Jonathan Allen in their book 'Fight' revealed extensive steps to cover up signs of Biden's aging in office ahead of his ill-fated reelection bid last year, as well as contingency planning if he chose to step aside or even died while in office. Biden's former aides also considered the possibility of putting him in a wheelchair if he was reelected to a second term, CNN's Jake Tapper and Axios's Alex Thompson reported in their book 'Original Sin.' Biden announced earlier this month that he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. The YouGov/Economist poll found 62 percent of Americans said they believe presidents should be required to publicly release all medical information that might affect their ability to serve as president, while 28 percent said leaders should have the same right as every other citizen to keep their medical records private. When broken down by party, 72 percent of Democrats and 58 percent of Republicans said they think presidents should be required to release medical info that could affect their ability to serve. The poll was conducted among 1,660 U.S. adults with a 3 percent margin of error. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
The Hill
28-05-2025
- Health
- The Hill
More Americans say Trump has been transparent about his health compared to Biden: poll
More Americans say President Trump has been transparent about his health compared to former President Biden, according to a new poll. The YouGov/Economist poll published Tuesday shows 42 percent of U.S. adults said they believe Trump has been open about his health while 31 percent said the same of Biden. Overall, 61 percent of adults said Biden was 'not very or not at all transparent' about his health, while 46 percent said the same of Trump. Nine percent said they were unsure how transparent Biden was about his health and 12 percent were unsure how transparent Trump has been. Views are polarized when broken down by party. Seventy-eight percent of Republicans said Trump has been transparent about his health while 14 percent of Democrats agreed. Meanwhile, 53 percent of Democrats said Biden was honest about his health; 14 percent of Republicans agreed. Presidential fitness standards have become a topic of discussion as Democratic insiders have come forward in multiple recent books alleging officials and allies around Biden helped cover up the then-president's cognitive decline and took extra steps to help him navigate travel, speeches and other duties. The Hill's Amie Parnes and NBC News's Jonathan Allen in their book 'Fight' revealed extensive steps to cover up signs of Biden's aging in office ahead of his ill-fated reelection bid last year, as well as contingency planning if he chose to step aside or even died while in office. Biden's former aides also considered the possibility of putting him in a wheelchair if he was reelected to a second term, CNN's Jake Tapper and Axios's Alex Thompson reported in their book 'Original Sin.' Biden announced earlier this month that he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. The YouGov/Economist poll found 62 percent of Americans said they believe presidents should be required to publicly release all medical information that might affect their ability to serve as president, while 28 percent said leaders should have the same right as every other citizen to keep their medical records private. When broken down by party, 72 percent of Democrats and 58 percent of Republicans said they think presidents should be required to release medical info that could affect their ability to serve. The poll was conducted among 1,660 U.S. adults with a 3 percent margin of error.
New York Times
22-05-2025
- Business
- New York Times
Winners of an ‘Exclusive Invitation' to Dine With Trump Will Gather Tonight
A group of 220 cryptocurrency enthusiasts who won a dinner with President Trump by investing in his memecoin will gather tonight at his golf club in Virginia, an event that has sparked outrage from critics who call it an unethical sale of access to the presidency. Mr. Trump and his business partners in the venture announced the event last month, calling it the 'most EXCLUSIVE INVITATION' in the world. They framed it as a contest: The top 220 buyers of the coin would dine with the president at the Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Va., while the top 25 would join him at a more intimate cocktail reception and go on a tour of the White House the next day. A leaderboard on the website of Mr. Trump's memecoin, called $TRUMP, allowed crypto investors to see how much they needed to purchase to move up the rankings and win a spot. In effect, Mr. Trump was offering access to himself in exchange for an investment in his cryptocurrency, which he started selling just days before his inauguration in January. Democrats in Congress and even some Republicans have assailed the contest as an inappropriate use of presidential power. A protest outside the golf club is scheduled for Thursday afternoon. A memecoin is a type of cryptocurrency tied to an online joke or mascot; it typically has no function beyond speculation. But Mr. Trump's coins have become a vehicle for investors, including some based overseas, to funnel money to his family. A business entity tied to the Trumps sits on a large stash of the $TRUMP cryptocurrency and collects fees every time the coins change hands. So far, the coin has generated at least $320 million in fees, which the Trumps share with their business partners, according to Chainalysis, a crypto analytics firm. The contest was set up by a company called Fight, Fight, Fight, which was created in January and is named after Mr. Trump's response to the assassination attempt against him in July. The Fight, Fight, Fight website, run by Bill Zanker, a longtime business partner of the Trump family, earlier promised 'a Special V.I.P. White House tour' for the top 25 token holders. Now the website still promises a 'V.I.P. Tour,' but there is no reference to the White House. An administration official said there would be no official White House tour when asked about this change and that the White House had 'nothing' to do with the event. But the administration official said the organizers might still be organizing a tour of the East Wing of the White House, which is available to the public. A spokesman for the Trump Organization also attempted to distance the company from the event, saying it was not involved. But the Trump family itself, through a corporate entity called CIC Digital, takes a cut of the profits, and the dinner is being held at a golf club the family owns. Representative Sam Liccardo, Democrat of California, called the dinner an offense to the principles of honest government in the United States. 'No politician could have designed a scheme better suited to facilitate corruption from foreign individuals than the issuance of a digital asset that largely conceals the identity of its buyer,' said Mr. Liccardo, a member of the House Financial Services Committee who generally is supportive of the crypto industry. Most of the dinner guests are not publicly known, identified only by short nicknames on the digital leaderboard. But the final list included investors from Singapore, Australia and the United States, according to analysis by the crypto forensics firm Nansen and The New York Times. Some of those investors have said that they hope to use the dinner as an opportunity to press Mr. Trump's on crypto policies. 'I will definitely not hesitate to share my perspective,' said Vincent Liu, who is attending the dinner as a representative of Kronos Research, a crypto firm founded in Taiwan. 'It's great to see the current direction that everything's going.' Several of the dinner guests told The Times in interviews that they expected the crowd to include a large number of crypto industry executives from around the world. They see the event as an opportunity to listen to Mr. Trump talk about his crypto agenda and gain insight into how they might be able to expand operations in the United States or even enter the U.S. marketplace for the first time, after Biden-era rules led many of them to avoid investments here. This week, Justin Sun, a crypto billionaire who runs the Tron platform, announced that he would also attend the dinner — and that he controlled the account listed as No. 1 on the leaderboard, with more than $20 million worth of coins. Mr. Sun, who was charged with fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2023, was also a large investor in World Liberty Financial, another Trump family crypto venture. The S.E.C. paused Mr. Sun's fraud case not long after Mr. Trump took power in January. 'Honored to support @POTUS and grateful for the invitation,' Mr. Sun wrote on social media this week.
Mint
20-05-2025
- Politics
- Mint
Joe Biden did not decline alone
Accept, for a moment, Joe Biden's contention that he is as mentally as sharp as ever. Then try to explain some revelations of the books beginning to appear about his presidency: that he never held a formal meeting to discuss whether to run for a second term; that he never heard directly from his own pollsters about his dismal public standing, or anything else; that by 2024 most of his own cabinet secretaries had no contact with him; that, when he was in Washington, he would often eat dinner at 4.30pm and vanish into his private quarters by 5.15; that when he travelled, he often skipped briefings while keeping a morning appointment with a makeup artist to cover his wrinkles and liver spots. You might think that Mr Biden—that anyone—would welcome as a rationale that he had lost a step or two. It is a kinder explanation than the alternatives: vanity, hubris, incompetence. In fact, by March 2023, there were times, behind the scenes, when Mr Biden seemed 'completely out of it, spent, exhausted, almost gone", according to 'Original Sin", by Jake Tapper, of CNN, and Alex Thompson, a reporter for Axios. In one encounter in December 2022, he did not remember the name of his national security adviser or communications director. 'You know George," an aide prodded Mr Biden in June 2024, coaxing him to recognise George Clooney, who was starring at a fundraiser for him. Mr Biden's aides tried to compensate by walking beside him to his helicopter, to disguise his gait and catch him if he stumbled, and by using two cameras for remarks to be shown on video so they could camouflage incoherence with jump cuts. Jonathan Allen, a reporter for NBC, and Amie Parnes, a reporter for the Hill, describe in 'Fight" how aides would tack down fluorescent tape to guide the president to the lectern at fund-raisers. Once the most loquacious of politicians, Mr Biden ended up clinging to brief texts on teleprompters for even casual political remarks. Such in-plain-sight accommodations point to what is slightly ridiculous about the present exercise of exposing Mr Biden's decline. It was obvious to many people: to donors, to some Democratic politicians on the rare occasions they met him and, most important, to Americans, who saw through his pretence long before June 2024, when he fell apart in debate with Donald Trump. In April 2023, only a third of voters told Pew Research that they thought Mr Biden was 'mentally sharp". For that reason, focusing on Mr Biden's health is useful now less to tell a cautionary tale about his own decline, made even more melancholy by his cancer diagnosis, than one about the decline of his party and the press. 'Fight" details how, after Mr Biden failed in debate, party leaders struggled to prevent the electoral catastrophe they foresaw. Even the most influential of Democrats, Barack Obama, who is portrayed as lacking confidence in both Mr Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris, emerges in this account as ineffectual as he belatedly seeks some sort of 'mini-primary". The parties have become so weak that whoever becomes their nominee can dominate them. Mr Biden's vanity, and that of his family and closest aides, overrode common sense about whether he should seek a second term. Few Democrats spoke up about his infirmity while he was in office. With few exceptions, journalists from left-leaning news organisations, quick to deplore Mr Trump's behaviour, competed to expose Mr Biden's frailty only once Democrats were pushing him out. Journalists from right-leaning news organisations are still pounding away at Mr Biden's mental or ethical lapses; they show less interest in Mr Trump's. 'We got so screwed by Biden as a party," David Plouffe, the rare Democrat in either book willing to attach his name to such criticism, told the authors of 'Original Sin". Mr Plouffe helped run Ms Harris's campaign for president after she replaced Mr Biden. Mr Plouffe describes as 'one of the great lessons of 2024" something that only a condescending, insular political organisation could possibly need to learn: 'never again can we as a party suggest to people that what they're seeing is not true". (Regular readers may recall that Lexington, and The Economist, urged Mr Biden not to run again back when he was riding high, after the Democrats overperformed in the midterms of 2022.) Many Democrats who condemn Republican congressmen for lacking the courage to oppose Mr Trump and call out his lies might instead pause to consider their own weakness, calculation or inattention. Even after that shocking debate, Democratic leaders who insisted Mr Biden was fit for a second term included not just Ms Harris but Governor Gavin Newsom of California, Governor J.B. Pritzker of Illinois and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, all possible presidential candidates. Have they since absorbed Mr Plouffe's lesson? A bridge, abridged It's the easy one. The party will probably not nominate an oldster again any time soon. Neither book shows that Mr Biden's age led to policy failures by degrading his decision-making, as opposed to hiscommunication skills (as essential as breath to a president). Regardless, nominating a young candidate won't resolve the party's confusion. The hard questions for Democrats are not about Mr Biden's age but about how they should face the other challenges he struggled with, including immigration, the deficit and the implementation of his own infrastructure plan. Revisionist historians may someday emphasise Mr Biden's legislative achievements. But those cannot compensate for his hubris. Having once declared himself a bridge to a new generation, he became, instead, just a bridge 'from one Trump term to the next", the authors of 'Fight" conclude. This may not be merely a story of the decline of a man, his party and the media. It may turn out to be about the decline of American democracy itself.
