The South African media, which initially saw President Cyril Ramaphosa’s meeting with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office on Wednesday as a disaster, is now proclaiming it to have been a triumph.
News24.com’s lead story on Thursday proclaimed: “Ramaphosa fends off Trump’s claims, secures path for future US-SA trade.” Citing “analysts,” the article claimed that South Africa’s president had “successfully reset relations,” and had debunked claims of “genocide.” The result was that “South Africa was vindicated.”
Notably absent from the article: any evidence of any commitments that Ramaphosa had secured from Trump as the result of his “success.” Ramaphosa himself had admitted that his staff had been inadequately briefed for the public meeting with Trump, and said that the private meeting that followed had focused on golf.
An editorial in the same publication was somewhat more forthright in admitting that the meeting had been a rough one, but noted that Trump had at least forced South Africa to confront its “scourge” of violent crime.
South Africa’s Business Day joined other mainstream media outlets in decrying the “ambush” of Ramaphosa — when, in fact, it was the South African leader who tried to ambush Trump first on the issue of “genocide.”
Ramaphosa referred pointedly to the white members of his delegation, using their skin color in an attempt to refute Trump — and to do so in the Oval Office. His mistake was to assume Trump would be unprepared.
The Business Day quoted former U.S. Ambassador Patrick Gaspard — a political organizer appointed to the post by President Barack Obama, and later the head of George Soros’s Open Society Foundations — as saying that “[e]ngaging on Trump’s terms never goes well for anyone,” implying that Ramaphosa had failed. But a spokesperson for Ramaphosa claimed that his boss “did not fall for the trap” that Trump supposedly laid.
Other South African outlets, including the opposition-friendly Citizen, contented themselves with correcting minor discrepancies, pointing out that the white crosses in a video that Trump showed Ramaphosa were memorials to murdered farmers, and not actual grave sites.
What viewers could see for themselves was that Trump had not only bested Ramaphosa, but had listened directly to the concerns of the South African people.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of Trump 2.0: The Most Dramatic ‘First 100 Days’ in Presidential History, available for Amazon Kindle. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
