The So-Called Trump-Ramaphosa ‘Ambush’

Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness

Nothing highlights the poverty of the media-Democratic mind than its weary use of echo-chamber buzzwords. Once Pravda-like instructions are sent out from DNC operatives, mindless media anchors mouth them in lockstep as gospel.

So, it was with the supposed “ambush” when South African President Cyril Ramaphosa met Donald Trump. Trump indeed pressed his guest on a number of issues, from the decades-long targeted killing of white agriculturalists on their farms by black hit teams that have totaled somewhere between 1,500 and 3,500, depending on how one defines such targeted killings.

Trump further wanted an explanation from Ramaphosa on his government’s new legislation aimed at land confiscation without compensation, and the de facto vanishing number of Boer farmers.

Trump was further bewildered by Ramaphosa’s assertion that the new law would not be used to take private property without paying for it (“No, no, no, no. Nobody can take land”), when in fact that was the very purpose of the new legislation in the first place. Trump also showed Ramaphosa videos highlighting a resurgence of South African extremism of the tired “Kill the Boer” sort.

The dictionaries define “ambush” roughly as “a surprise attack by people lying in wait in a hidden or concealed position.”

Ramaphosa’s visit was no surprise. He, not Trump, requested it. Ramaphosa spoke openly to the media before the meeting that he was planning to convince Trump that there were neither widespread killings of white farmers nor arbitrary confiscation of land.

In sum, Trump was the host; Ramaphosa was the guest, who requested the meeting to present his case for a return of a number of concessions from the U.S. He knew Trump would raise issues that had estranged South Africa from both the president and Congress, and he was calmly prepped, as expected, to offer counterarguments.

But why was Ramaphosa so eager for a meeting?

He knew that South Africa had enjoyed a rare, sweetheart, one-of-a-kind, no-tariff deal from the U.S. that had empowered his nation in the last few years to vastly expand its exports. In 2024, South Africa achieved a staggering near $9 billion surplus with the U.S.

Yet Ramaphosa and South Africa have a funny way of expressing gratitude for the free trade magnanimity accorded by the U.S.—especially both as a recipient of nearly $500 million in annual foreign aid and after raising asymmetrical high tariffs on lots of U.S. imports.

Recently, the South African ambassador to the U.S., Ebrahim Rasool, was expelled after he gratuitously slandered his host, the president, as a white “supremacist”—supposedly playing on “white victimhood as a dog whistle” out of fears of non-white demographics.

Like most globalist diplomats and intellectuals, Rasool had forged long ties with the American left and was accustomed to cheap, virtue-signaling trashing of the U.S. to his sympathetic progressive audiences. Most in South Africa supported the expelled diplomat’s allegations and smearing of his host president, as he returned home a hero rather than an embarrassment.

South Africa still trades on Nelson Mandela’s conciliation policies abroad, even as it has largely rejected his principles and insidiously transmogrified into an illiberal, violent, and racialist state.

In a characteristic fit of schizophrenic hypocrisy, the supposedly “ambushed” President Ramaphosa recently called the few South African white farmer families “cowards” who dared to consider fleeing his government-institutionalized harassment to resettle in the U.S.

I suppose he meant that they were to play the odds and hope they were not among the 60 to 70 farmers murdered each year for their race, and the hundreds assaulted. Or perhaps they were to take solace from the American left that such stuff happens because South Africa is one of the most violent places on earth, where thousands of blacks are murdered each year—though by other blacks and not for their race.

Why, then, the anger at seeing a handful of farmers leaving? And why would Ramaphosa want any largesse from an administration his own ambassador condemned as racist?

On the one hand, most South African politicians would like nothing better than to see the final riddance of the vestigial seven percent of the population.

But on the other hand, the lesson of Zimbabwe’s expulsions reminds them that such mass flight might well collapse the entire South African agricultural sector, if not the economy in general.

That same incoherence characterized Ramaphosa’s relationship with Elon Musk and his Starlink global internet system. He desperately wants Musk to do for South Africa what he has done for lots of countries, including Ukraine—ensuring high-speed internet at a cut-rate cost to remote areas.

But in contrast, his government uniquely insists that Musk essentially turn over about a third of any South African franchise to black South African partners. Ramaphosa will back down because he wants good Internet more than reminding the world that investors in South Africa must follow its racialist laws of partnership. Nonetheless, Ramaphosa has developed a bad habit of cultivating foreign magnanimity, but in a fashion that is ultimately insulting, often racist, and full of ingratitude.

In other areas, South Africa has sided with Russia in the Ukraine War—an embarrassing fact rarely mentioned by the adoring left. Indeed, it has facilitated arms transfers between Russia and North Korea, as well as opposed U.N. sanctions on Russia.

South Africa is one of the most anti-Israeli, if not anti-Semitic, nations in the world, and supported the International Criminal Court’s issuance of arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It usually votes at the UN in lockstep opposition to the U.S.

Of course, all that business is South Africa’s own.

But it should not expect most-favored-nation trade status and generous aid from a government its chief diplomat has smeared.

Nor should Ramaphosa have counted on an ebullient White House welcome when he and his predecessors have opposed U.S. policy on almost every international issue. (The media was excited before the meeting that far from being an ambush, Ramaphosa was going to confront Trump and set him straight.)

Indeed, South Africa has aligned itself on most key fault lines with dictatorial China and Russia—without a word of worry about the plight of the Uighurs.

The American Left and the media have blasted Trump, claiming there is no effort to kill white farmers in South Africa. They claim the “Kill the Boer” mantras belong to a long-ago age of legitimate resistance to apartheid.

Not true. In fact, Julius Malema, the leader of the “Economic Freedom Fighters,” the third largest party in South Africa, led a huge stadium crowd recently in 2023 in the “Kill the Boer, Kill the farmer” chants. And he added, “The revolution in South Africa is guaranteed.”

Malema is no aberration. The South African “Equality Court” in 2022 ruled that “Kill the Boer, Kill the Farmer” was not “hate speech.” If calling for the mass death of an entire minority group is not hate speech in South Africa, then one wonders what possibly could be hate speech in that nation?

Trump hardly needed more evidence that by any traditional measure, South Africa is an ungracious, illiberal “democracy” that relies on U.S. largesse while opposing every element of its foreign policy.

That is why Trump stripped away America’s singular no-tariff policy and slapped a 30 percent tariff on South Africa’s exports to reduce the U.S. trade deficit with Pretoria. The state department will likely not be so ready to issue carte blanche travel, green card, or student visas to South Africans unless applicants can demonstrate credible fear of systemic, institutionalized violence.

Again, there was little animus in Trump’s meeting, and no “ambush” at all. Like the denouement of the so-called Zelensky “ambush,” Ramaphosa will likely be back, realizing that he, not Trump, is the president in need.

The end of the session was more or less a visually aided wake-up call to South Africa. In the future, President Ramaphosa might be wiser to look for Belt and Road help among his apparent true friends and allies. Russia and South Africa are similarly aligned on the Ukraine War, friendship with China, North Korea, and Iran, and share a like-minded common hatred of Israel.

Trump is simply reminding the world that the long-ago optimism of a new Mandela South Africa has long vanished. And U.S. foreign policy needs to readjust to the alterations that South Africa, not the U.S., had previously made to our relationship.

Ramaphosa apparently thinks, like the thousands of South African residents in the U.S., that the adoring, institutionalized, left-wing administrative state, media, universities, and foundations still run the U.S. But at least for the foreseeable future, they do not.

As a result, Trump is wishing South Africa well, not as an enemy, but simply as no longer truly a friend, given its undeniable serial and passive-aggressive hostility.