Mansoor’s Musings: Trump’s White House drama fails to impress

By Mansoor Ladha on June 12, 2025.

President Trump’s drama during the South African President Cyril Ramaphosa’s visit to the White House was the second spectacle of how he treats foreign heads of state. I am amazed that after how Trump and Vice-president JD Vance admonished Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ramaphosa even had the courage to enter the White House. Ramaphosa and his delegation went to Washington hoping for an economic boost and a reset after months of acrimony with the Trump administration.

They instead received brutal insults, played out to millions across the world – a pathetic performance and painful spectacle. Trump ambushed his counterpart by playing videos which he claimed showed proof of a genocide. The videos included an opposition politician singing a song that some believe evokes violence against white South Africans. Trump also displayed photos of white people he said had been murdered, prompting Ramaphosa to remind him that such crimes affect people of any race.

While posing as a champion of anti-genocide, it’s ironic that Trump has been ignoring the apartheid and genocide tactics practiced by U.S.’s favourite ally and weapons beneficiary, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu who has already killed over 50,000 Palestinians, including women and children, starving them for months and now allowing 22 new Jewish settlements in Gaza. What hypocrisy!

South Africans have suffered during the colonial regime, and they haven’t forgotten what apartheid had done to them; they had been victims of apartheid for years and they would be the last people on earth to practice the same system on anyone else.

Trump didn’t do his homework properly and made a fool of himself in front of international media by being vindictive, revengeful and undiplomatic. Trump conveniently neglected to mention that it was the South African government which allowed the U.S. embassy to consider the asylum applications inside the country and let the group board a chartered flight – not scenes normally associated with refugees fleeing persecution. Trump doesn’t realize that his offensive Oval Office treatments to foreign heads of state exposes his own failings, painting a negative picture of him as an undiplomatic host and insensitive dictator.

Ramaphosa’s conduct with Trump reminded South Africans at home of his diplomatic skills, and of his importance to the country’s rules-based order. He is, along with Nelson Mandela, considered South Africa’s greatest ever alliance builder and facilitator. He was at the nerve centre of negotiating an end to the racist system of apartheid in the early 1990s, and in keeping South Africa together when many had prophesised its fatal failure. He has stayed calm, smiled and faced down far more bitter opponents before.

“I believe if a snap poll was done today, we would see his personal ratings go up,” says South African editor and founder of explain.co.za Verashni Pillay. “He excels in these high-pressure situations. He has this wealth of negotiating experience in arguably far more tense environments where there has been actual blood on the streets and imminent civil war. That’s why you saw him looking particularly relaxed. He’s masterful at diffusing tension at key moments.”

But Trump’s treatment, ostensibly meant to ridicule and embarrass Ramaphosa around the world, reminded many South Africans of what he brings to the government and the country – a constant, stable and predictable centre.

South Africa’s Afrikaner-led government introduced apartheid in 1948, taking racial segregation to a more extreme level by passing laws which banned marriages across racial lines, reserved many skilled and semi-skilled jobs for white people, and forced black people to live in what were called townships and homelands. They were also denied a decent education, with Afrikaner leader Hendrik Verwoerd infamously remarking in the 1950s that “blacks should never be shown the greener pastures of education. They should know their station in life is to be hewers of wood and drawers of water.”

Afrikaner dominance of South Africa ended in 1994, when black people were allowed to vote for the first time in a nationwide election, bringing Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress (ANC) to power. Afrikaners currently number more than 2.5 million out of a population of more than 60 million – about four percent.

Commenting on the incident, BBC reported none of South Africa’s political parties – including those that represent Afrikaners and the white community in general – have claimed that there is a genocide in South Africa. In fact, Trump’s claim was described as “nonsense” by John Steenhuisen – the leader of South Africa’s second-biggest party, the Democratic Alliance (DA), and the agriculture minister in the coalition government led by Ramaphosa. Jaco Kleynhans, a senior official in the Afrikaner lobby group Solidarity, said he had told U.S. government officials that “there’s no genocide and there’s no government seizures [of land].”

Police Minister Senzo Mchunu gave a breakdown of killings on farms to deflate claims of a genocide. He said that between January and March, five out of the six people killed on farms were black and one was white. The white victim lived on a farm, while the black people who were killed comprised two farm owners, two employees and one manager, Mchunu said. He added that in the previous quarter, from October to December 2024, 12 murders on farms were recorded. One of the 12 – a farm owner – was white.

Even though white-minority rule ended in 1994, its effects are still being felt. Average living standards are far higher for the white community than black people. White people occupy 62.1% of top management posts, despite only accounting for 7.7 percent of the country’s economically active population, according to a recent report by South Africa’s Commission for Employment Equity.

I suppose we’ll have to wait patiently for Trump’s next performance when the next head of state ventures to go to the White House.

Mansoor Ladha is a Calgary-based journalist and author of Aga Khan: Bridge between East and East; Off the Cuff; Memoirs of a Muhindi: Fleeing East Africa for the West and A Portrait in Pluralism: Aga Khan’s Shia Ismaili Muslims.

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