It took US President Donald Trump just shy of 30 days in the White House to reveal himself, if any more evidence were needed, as a treacherous liar devoid of principle, honour or humour.
For reasons we may speculate on but never completely know, Trump is desperate to appease Russia’s murderous and child-kidnapping leader Vladimir Putin. Earlier this week he ludicrously accused Ukraine of starting its current war with Russia, despite the whole world having watched the Russians invade three years ago. He called Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky a “dictator” who had failed to hold an election while fighting off the Russians.
The accusation brought to a screeching halt a building euphoria among conservatives about Trump’s robust shake-up of American ties with Europe. Douglas Murray, a conservative British commentator and fierce defender of Israel, and Trump supporter, was one of many appalled by the US leader: “President Trump has a chance to bring an end to this war, to stop the killing,” he wrote in the New York Post. “Maybe even win a Nobel Prize for Peace.
“But,” he said, “he will not be honoured if the peace is an appeasement, one that bows down in the face of evil as it denies obvious truths. The judgment of history will be even harsher — decades of peace and prosperity in Europe and America thrown away to a resurgent Russia harassing the East. Without a strong peace, it won’t be just Ukraine that suffers. It is all of us. That is the ultimate truth.”
Another truth is that Trump is himself anti-Semitic. Zelensky, the most courageous Jewish leader in office anywhere, is, according to Trump, a “comedian”, a “war profiteer” and the war itself a “scam”, language dripping with prejudice. If anything, Trump’s support for Israel is motivated less by an affinity for Israelis than a dread of Islam.
So when Afrikaner farmers hold “thank you Trump” rallies outside the US embassy in Pretoria, or when the chief rabbi declares South Africans should be grateful for Trump’s criticisms of ANC land expropriation policies, they’re laying down with a capricious Russian shill who’d sell them out in a heartbeat if it suited him. You can’t take the bits of Trump you approve of and wash your hands of the rest. I asked Elon Musk’s Grok3, the new artificial intelligence app on his X, formerly Twitter platform, if it thought that Trump was a psychopath. It said it didn’t want to speculate without being able to make a clinical diagnosis. I checked that answer with the new Chinese sensation DeepSeek and it agreed.
But opponents and critics of ANC policies need to look beyond Trump. He won an election fair and square and he’ll change the world as we know it and make all of our lives infinitely more dangerous and expensive in the process. As ordinary South Africans we cannot be part of it. For the ANC itself, it is being presented with potentially entirely new foreign policy risks.
Like all ANC leaders, Ramaphosa has to play a dangerous game, borrowing from the West and deferring to the East
Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping see themselves as entitled to their own “zones of influence”. Trump likes the notion too. In your own zone you get to do the crime without the punishment. The ANC also likes it. I remember Jacob Zuma making the argument when Putin occupied the Crimea in 2014.
And Cyril Ramaphosa has done so again with Ukraine, insisting the expansion of Nato in Eastern Europe triggered the current Russian invasion.
It is rubbish of course. Before the Russians invaded Ukraine in February 2022 there had been no actual Nato expansion in Europe for almost 20 years.
But like all ANC leaders, Ramaphosa has to play a dangerous game, raising the money he needs in the West and paying his ideological dues in the East. Which zone would the ANC see itself in? I would assume the worst with Trump and stick in the middle, with Europe perhaps, as they search for safety.
As this week’s failure to pass a budget demonstrates, we don’t have many choices. The now moot budget plan to impose a VAT increase, to 17% has been rightly condemned. But the fact that we need the money it would raise — not just R60bn for this year but R60bn every year — doesn’t go away.
We get the money only by borrowing it, raising taxes, cutting costs or growing the economy. More borrowing is not feasible.
So too is raising taxes, and we manifestly do not know how to grow the economy. So cuts it will have to be.
There’s a lot of fat, perhaps even R60bn of it. But then there’s next year, and the next. On the Left the cry goes out that we have all the money we need just sitting there in South African pensions.
And when all of that’s been spent on unproductive salaries, then what? Growth, when it is finally our last possible option, will ask us all the hardest questions.
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