Maybe Anthony Albanese will be having Fever dreams where he is sitting next to Trump in the Oval Office when the president suddenly turns down the lights and plays a video like he just did with Ramaphosa.
Trump rolls footage of Albanese in 2017, when he was a shadow minister, saying “He (Trump) scares the shit out of me and I think it’s of some concern that the leader of the free world thinks that you can conduct politics through 140 characters on Twitter overnight.”
Then it cuts to the now prime minister this year saying that Trump’s tariffs on Australia “have no basis in logic – and they go against the basis of our two nations’ partnership. This is not the act of a friend.”
Trump’s video then cuts to ambassador Kevin Rudd’s now deleted social media posts calling Trump a “traitor to the West” and the “most destructive president in history.”
The video ends with footage of Australia II sailing past the American boat Liberty in 1983 to win the America’s Cup, with Trump frowning that this showed that Australia did not support his vision of America First.
Albo can relax, he won’t be the target of Trump’s ire when he visits Washington. But the president’s weaponisation of the Oval Office to attack or embarrass world leaders in front of everyone will have many of them dreading their next visit to Washington.
Gone, it seems, are the days when two leaders smile warmly for the cameras in the Oval Office, make a few glib motherhood statements and then do the real negotiating behind closed doors.
Instead Trump is willing to prosecute them in front of the world and in the case of Ramaphosa, armed with prepared videos and newspaper clippings.
In the case of both Zelensky and Ramaphosa, Trump’s attacks had the active support of other key players in the room. In the case of Zelensky, it was Vice President JD Vance who threw the first stone. With Ramaphosa, the South African-born billionaire and Trump confident Elon Musk – who has actively promoted the Trump’s claims about white genocide in South Africa – was also in the room watching on and was even referenced by Trump during the confrontation.
The problem is that in Trump’s two Oval Office attacks so far – Zelensky and Ramaphosa – his very public claims have been rubbery at best.
With the Zelensky Oval Office ambush in February Trump was unhappy that the Ukrainian leader did not appear grateful enough for US military aid, despite Zelensky having repeatedly thanked the US for it. Trump also seemed angry that Zelensky didn’t agree that Putin was the benign, trustworthy leader that Trump seems to think he is. The only outcome of that public confrontation was to make Putin’s position in peace negotiations stronger. Three months on, Zelensky’s Judgement on Putin has proved to be far more accurate than Trump’s given that Putin is now stonewalling any prospect of peace in Ukraine.
With Ramaphosa, Trump was also off the mark. Trump confronted Ramaphosa with claims of a genocide against white Afrikaner farmers.
The murder of white farmers has occurred in South Africa and it is a legitimate issue. But South Africa is in the grip of spiralling crime across the country, with some 7000 people murdered every three months – the vast majority of whom are black. There is no evidence to suggest that white farmers suffer from the nation’s crime wave more than any other South Africans do. Trump has also expressed concern about recent laws allowing the government to acquire private land – including white-owned farms – in the public interest without compensation.
He recently signed an executive order allowing the resettlement of ‘Afrikaner refugees’ because he said these laws created a system that ‘racially disfavoured landowners.’
The laws are contentious in South Africa and they do discriminate against Afrikaner farmers because they are the dominant landholders. But successive South African governments have tried to unwind the state-sanctioned segregation of the apartheid era which has led to white South Africans owning three-quarters of the country’s land despite only making up 7 per cent of the population. It’s a fraught policy and white farmers are the losers from this attempt by the South African government to allow others to become landowners. But it is a far more complex issue than Trump portrayed it as.
Yet it sees that the precedent has now been set. The Oval Office is the new Colosseum, where world leaders need to be prepared for anything. And Trump is right about one thing – it does make for great TV.
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First it was Volodymyr Zelensky, now it is South African president Cyril Ramaphosa. Who will be Donald Trump’s next Oval Office ambush?