Ramaphosa stays calm with golf diplomacy in face of Trump's latest Oval Office ambush

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

71% : President Trump brings the receipts.
60% : In the White House on Wednesday came a crash course history lesson on oppression and violence in that complex country, delivered to South Africa's president, courtesy of the US president Donald Trump.
59% : Trump listened gravely to this more nuanced version of South Africa's history as told by those living, breathing and shaping it.
56% : The visitor thanked the president for the 150 respirators Trump had sent South Africa during the pandemic.
50% : Golfers Retief Goosen and Ernie Els offer a more nuanced version of South Africa's history after Trump delivers crash-course lesson on oppression of whites "Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world," Nelson Mandela said in the summer of 2003, when post-apartheid South Africa was in its fledgling state.
43% : Ramaphosa, with his old-school gravitas and deliberate speaking style, buttered Trump up by pointing out that he had brought with him the champion golfers Retief Goosen and Ernie Els - although Trump was unimpressed to learn that 89-year-old Gary Player had sent his apologies.
40% : But Ramaphosa is a veteran of the formative days of a country of which Trump knows nothing.
39% : Ramaphosa left the weighty golf book behind and promised Trump he has been practising his game and joked that he is ready to play a round - maybe at the G20 summit in Johannesburg in November.
38% : "We became the respirator kings," Trump reminisced.
38% : Still, Trump pressed on, casting a brief glance at the wider sweep of South Africa's notorious history of white supremacy.
34% : Instead, he fixed a glassy stare on the South African president as Trump continued to explain to his guest that he was the head of state of a country where it was open season on white people.
34% : "There is literally nothing better than president Trump calling out foreign leaders at the White House," wrote David Sack, a Cape Towner who has made his fortune in the US on Musk's X platform.
29% : Ramaphosa held his nerve and calmly, politely, explained to Trump that South Africa, as a multiparty democracy, allows conflicting voices.
27% : In February, Trump signed an executive order cutting financial assistance to South Africa, citing 'unjust racial discrimination.'
25% : Another clip showed a straight road lined with cars which, president Trump explained to his guest, were mourners visiting the graves of the white farmers murdered in a land reclamation and murder which, he inferred, was a genocide in the making.
24% : The minister respectfully told president Trump that, indeed, South Africa needed to "start making farm attacks and stock theft a priority crime".

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.