'Ambush That Foreign Leader' returns!
Reality star Donald Trump scores with an all-new episode from the Oval Office. This one features a Black guy.
The reality-television studio formerly known as the Oval Office lit up today with another installment of “Ambush That Foreign Leader.”
Reality TV star Donald Trump staged a brilliant encore to his epic beatdown of Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky. In today’s episode, Trump baited South African President Cyril Ramaphosa with utterly false claims about a non-existent genocide of oppressed white people in his country.
The BBC’s live blog delivered the best, most-linkable coverage of the event.
Ramaphosa smartly declined to take the bait by shaking off the falsehoods with good humor, even a smile. For his part, Trump pointed to “thousands of articles and documentaries” exposing the oppression of white people in South Africa — a set of circumstances somewhat mitigated by the fact that it doesn’t exist. (The crime rate against whites there, while problematic, is empirically lower than that for Blacks.)
Last week, Trump welcomed 59 white South African refugees into the United States under “Mission South Africa,” a made-for-Fox-News policy stroke. While there’s no evidence these people were in any imminent danger, it’s fair to say they might have felt uncomfortable as a remnant of that apartheid business.
In case you’re not up on world history, the Fake News claimed that apartheid — with its state-sanctioned segregation and discrimination and actual oppression of Blacks over nearly half a century — was somehow a bad thing. The deranged media even puffed up some guy named Nelson Mandela.
But remember, the same Fake News makes up stuff about climate change and the 2020 U.S. presidential election not having been rigged.
None of that stuff matters as much as today’s excellent show, which once again earned high marks for choreography and content. Photos showed regular cast member and Vice President J.D. Vance in his usual role: the glowering sidekick.
Trump exhibited his production chops by placing Elon Musk in the background — a silent cameo from the South African–born DOGE dropout. No speaking part. Not even the customary child prop. What fine imagery, though.
For his part, Ramaphosa inadvertently confirmed Trump’s far superior casting skill. The South African inadvisedly brought along two famous white PGA golfers from his country — Ernie Els and Retief Goosen — as a show of racial harmony. But they sandbagged him under questioning from fellow legendary golfer Trump:
Els said “two wrongs don’t make a right,” while Goosen said his family was living behind electric fences on a farm. Neither confirmed the non-existent genocide, but Trump taught Ramaphosa a fine lesson about coming into his house with some weak reality-TV props.
Politically, the optics were irresistible: an all-powerful American president basking in the opportunity to scold and humiliate a Black head of state — in the Oval Office, no less. Talk about MAGA catnip.
It offered a throwback to 2018, when then-President Trump referred to African nations and Haiti as “shithole countries.” You might remember that the deranged media didn’t take that so well. Some haters and losers even dug up that 2016 campaign rally where Trump pointed to a supporter in the crowd and said:
“Look at my African American over here! Look at him. Are you the greatest? You know what I’m talking about?”
Let’s be clear: Trump didn’t call South Africa a shithole today. And he didn’t refer to Ramaphosa as his African.
But he might as well have called him “my African guest star.”
The ratings today had to be great.
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