Covid showed Don the door
As Donald Trump departs to Florida to sulk, the world seemingly heaves a sigh of relief. It is striking, when one reads Rage, Bob Woodward’s account of Trump’s last year, to realise how different it could have been.
One forgets that at the beginning of 2020, Trump was riding high. He had all the advantages that a booming economy and presidential incumbency bring.
Woodward lays the immediate blame for Trump’s defeat on “the dynamite behind the door”. The phrase comes from Trump himself.
He told Woodward that as president he each day opened metaphorical doors, dealing with new events. Statistically, he knew that he would one day open a door with dynamite attached to it — an external event that could destroy his presidency.
Ironically, that door was clearly identified to him. On 28 January, 2020, the daily top-secret briefing featured a mysterious virus outbreak in China. Trump was only too happy to accept the assessment of his officials and the WHO that the virus was low risk.
His failure to dismantle the Covid dynamite caused enormous damage to the US – and blew up his re-election prospects, his presidential legacy and his party’s electoral future.
But Woodward says the biggest stick of “dynamite” wasn’t Covid. “It was Trump himself. The failure to organise. The lack of discipline. The lack of trust in experts. The failure to be a healing voice. The unwillingness to acknowledge error. The failure to do homework… ”
Trump won’t be the last leader to be undone by the pandemic. When they fall it will be, as with Trump, not that Covid was the biggest stick of dynamite, but because their personal failures lit the fuse.
That’s potentially true also in SA, despite the obvious differences.
Unlike Trump, Cyril Ramaphosa is no denialist. Nor is he cursed with the same destructive ego, or corrosive bile that needlessly makes enemies. And, admittedly, contrary to the miserable experience of most us, Ramaphosa has had a good Covid.
There was a widespread acceptance that he acted decisively when the pandemic arrived. Whatever the short-term economic costs, the government’s tough actions would buy time to make a failing health system fit for purpose.
It has not worked out like that. The time “bought” was squandered by a state that lacks organisational competence. It’s a government that allowed about R20 billion of the relief funds that it begged and borrowed, to be stolen – most of it by a political elite connected to the ANC. Yet the solution to the R21 billion needed for the vaccine roll-out is not to recover the money. Nor to contemplate the vanity of wasting R10 billion on SA Airways. It is, instead, to moot a “solidarity tax”.
Woodward rues Trump’s inability to build bridges. “The deep-seated hatreds flourished... He stoked them and did not make concerted efforts bring the country together.”
The ANC present policies are, not because of Ramaphosa’s belligerence but because of his timidity, doing the same. In the US, Covid’s most dramatic casualty has been Trump and the Republican party. In SA, it might be Ramaphosa and the ANC.
When they fall it will be, as with Trump, not that Covid was the biggest stick of dynamite, but because their personal failures lit the fuse.