US President Donald Trump has said he wants to usher in a new “golden age”, but as President Cyril Ramaphosa cunningly reminded us from Davos, the new administration is less golden age than Bronze Age.
Of course, as many pundits have pointed out, what Trump really wants isn’t so much a golden age as a second Gilded Age, that span of almost three decades after the US Civil War during which hard-nosed industrialists became oligarchs, giving rise to the East Coast elite that Trump has so desperately wanted to be a part of for so long.
Whacking a few more years on the end for good measure, Trump told the press this week that the US “was at its richest from 1870 to 1913” and that this wealth had been generated by tariffs.
When your second-largest trading partner is a pulsating, undulating blob of pure ego who believes that he is a brilliant dealmaker, sometimes a little white lie can go a very long way
You will be shocked to learn that the first claim is dubious, while the second is patently false —but of course it wouldn’t be a Trump presidency without an endless deluge of mis- and misinformation. Clearly, we have returned to regular programming.
This time around, however, it seems that some world leaders have learnt some new tricks.
One of those was Ramaphosa, who popped up in Davos to confirm that he is still alive and, given that reporters were quoting him as “the president of South Africa”, apparently still in politics.
We know that Ramaphosa is a diplomat — the negotiations that ended apartheid and that formed the new constitution needed the lightest of touches and most sophisticated people skills — and his former dealings with Trump seem to have been fairly silky.
For example, when Trump protested that Africa contained “shithole countries”, and tweeted the lie that white farmers were having their land seized while giving oxygen to the “white genocide” myth punted by Tucker Carlson, Ramaphosa ducked and wove like a prizefighter: the SA government Twitter account denounced Trump’s tweet as a “narrow perception which only seeks to divide our nation and reminds us of our colonial past” —but all Ramaphosa told the press was that Trump had been “misinformed”, as if the whole thing was the fault of an ignorant aide rather than Trump’s prejudices.
This week, though, Ramaphosa took it to a different level as he peeled back the façade of modernity and offered up the kind of excruciatingly transparent compliment you used to have to give kings 3,000 years ago, when you’d tell Mung The Chinless how handsome he was or Klub The Cleaver Of Heathen Skulls that his wisdom and keen grasp of jurisprudence were renowned through the world.
In this case it was something even more outlandish: Ramaphosa was looking forward to working with Trump, the SA president explained, because “President Trump is a great dealmaker and so am I”.
For anyone who’s read anything about Trump and his famously shabby, B-grade business career, it was toe-curling stuff.
This, after all, is a man who has bankrupted casinos and whose reality show about being a brilliant tycoon had to be filmed in a fake boardroom because the real one was too dirty and dingy. Having defaulted on debts for decades, he even took his incompetence and profligacy with him to the White House in his first term: in 2022 Forbes reported that Trump was “chained to money-losing real estate and drowning in debt when he left office” and only wriggled out of repaying the $900m (R16.64bn) he owed thanks to the intervention of rich and powerful friends.
In short, Trump is appalling at making deals. But Ramaphosa understands the game, now; and when your second-largest trading partner is a pulsating, undulating blob of pure ego who believes that he is a brilliant dealmaker, sometimes a little white lie can go a very long way.
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