John Matisonn: A different Trump behind closed doors during US-South Africa talks

Key topics:Trump was warm and businesslike in private talks with SA leadersFarm murders raised; US-South Africa engagement seen as constructiveTrump reversed G20 boycott; Johannesburg confirmed as 2025 host.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.The auditorium doors will open for BNIC#2 on 10 September 2025 in Hermanus. For more information and tickets, click here..By John Matisonn.It’s no exaggeration to say that the private Donald Trump who talked to South Africa’s leaders was unrecognisably different from the public Trump talking to South African leaders on the same afternoon. How different seems hard to believe.“The US president was “cordial, warm and engaging,” Agriculture Minister and DA leader John Steenhuisen said in an interview this week. “The meeting went much longer than scheduled.” Could that be true? Many on social media predicted before and claimed afterwards that he tore a strip off the South Africans, in private much more forcibly than anything that happened in the Oval Office ambush in front of an audience in the tens of millions.But several sources, including President Cyril Ramaphosa and Cosatu President Zingiswa Losi, say that’s not true, and in a wide-ranging interview Steenhuisen was unequivocal. Based on the business-like and focussed meeting over lunch, the DA leader came out confident that, while each side will obviously fight for their interests, the time for earnest engagement has arrived.“He’s going to deal with us sensibly,” Steenhuisen concluded. And after the attention the US president drew to farm murders, the Agriculture Minister will be better able to demand results to cut the high rural crime rate. In the Oval Office meeting, Steenhuisen said that farm murders – as well as stock theft – have to be designated priority crimes to crack down on the attacks and murders of people on farms.In the interview he also explained the context in which Trump reversed his administration’s decision to boycott the Johannesburg G20 meeting in November. This was how the US president phrased it: he said it was important for the other G20 countries that the US be there, so he would come.This was a dramatic shift from February, when his Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, aggressively refused to attend the foreign ministers’ G20 meeting, denouncing South Africa’s foreign policy on a wide range of issues as well as the treatment of white farmers.Reading between the lines, it is possible that Trump is more willing to attend now that he has wielded a big stick on South Africa with several months of merciless attack. South Africa will have to manage the inevitable demonstrations against the US leader. Now the ANC is likely to clamp down harder than it would have on ANC leaders participating in high-profile protests against the US president.Steenhuisen also cleared up confusion over how the golfers came to be at the meeting. Various critics in South Africa and the US have attacked Ramaphosa for inviting people who are not in his political camp and who were voluble critics of the government.Reports said they were chosen by Trump, but the truth is not quite, according to Steenhuisen. It started out as a joke.In phone conversation, Trump raised the idea of having his golfing friends in the meeting as a light-hearted joke. Ramaphosa thought about it, and decided it was not a bad idea. In the event, they seemed to calm the US president down and animate him about his favourite sport after the heated showdown over farm murders.This may explain why Ernie Els and Retief Goosen arrived too late for a preparatory meeting with the other delegation members, and why Gary Player, who is probably closest to Trump, did not join. Ramaphosa said he was feeling his age, but another report said he was in Japan.Player and Els both have homes in Florida, 42 minutes along the I-95 highway from Mar-a-Lago, on Jupiter Island.Now 90, Player is probably the president’s longest standing South African friend by decades. In a December interview with Biznews, just before Trump returned to the White House, Player said they still played golf together once a month. .Read more:.Worldview: Trump's false "white genocide" claims spark outrage in South Africa meeting.But Player has a higher media profile in the US. On January 7, 2021, the day after the January 6 attack on the capitol that got Trump impeached a second time, Trump awarded Player the Presidential Medal of Freedom. His son Marc, who also manages his father’s businesses, criticised his father for accepting the invitation when Trump’s reputation was at its lowest.At the lunch last week, Steenhuisen found Trump to have an “encyclopedic” knowledge of golf. “He remembered what club one of the golfers used on which green used to win a tournament in 1987,” Steenhuisen said.Now that Trump has given the green light for the G20, the government is under extra pressure to make Johannesburg more presentable to international media than it is now. The ANC is attempting several reforms on the dysfunctional Gauteng ANC to turn things around, but Steenhuisen was unequivocal, looking to municipal elections later next year, when the DA aims to be the biggest party and able to select coalition partners .“There’ll be no change in Johannesburg until there is a new government in the city council,” he said. “Anything less is just putting lipstick on a pig.”The government earlier contemplated Cape Town as the host venue, but airport capacity prevented it. The G20 attracts so many aircraft, including heads of states and their entourages, as well as so many private planes owned by business leaders, that they cannot all be accommodated at Cape Town International.In Johannesburg, besides OR Tambo Airport, jets will access Lanseria and possibly other airfields. When the new Cape Winelands Airport is complete, capacity will be large enough to accommodate a G20 and its private jets at Cape airports. For the 2025 G20, Trump and the other government heads will be in Johannesburg, where efforts are likely to spruce up the routes the convoys of cars will take. What will Trump think of what he sees? Of course, the famously mercurial president could change his mind any time between now and then. Maybe more than once.

John Matisonn: A different Trump behind closed doors during US-South Africa talks

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