Jonny Steinberg: When Trump does a Zuma, and Zuma does a Trump
Events in the US are following recent SA history to a degree that is uncanny. Three years ago we had a president who did not want to lose office lest he go to prison. He was prepared to bring down our constitutional order to get his way.
Today the US president believes his enemies will jail him if he relinquishes power. And so he plans not to go.
There is still much we do not know about Jacob Zuma s last
’ year as president. But some things we do. It is certain, for instance, that he mulled the idea of suspending indefinitely the ANC s elective conference at
’
Nasrec in December 2017, thus leaving him as party leader in perpetuity. In the end he doubted he could pull it off. And in any case he calculated that his candidate, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, would win on the conference floor. Had he anticipated her defeat he would almost certainly have tried to derail the conference. What would have happened next is anyone s guess.
’
It also seems probable that when the ANC national executive recalled Zuma from the SA presidency in early 2018 he put out feelers to the defence force, to get an idea of how it would respond if he called a state of emergency. In any event, this is how his adversaries understood the strange media conference he gave in the final hours of his presidency. The full history hasn t been written, but what is
’
clear is that we had a president tempted to break the foundations beneath our feet. Donald Trump s situation is
’
rather different. He understands that if he is not declared winner of the US presidential election by January 20, he has to go. And so he does plan to be declared the winner, even if Joe Biden is too. The idea is to throw the electoral process into such an extreme state of doubt that both parties can credibly claim their candidate has won.
His chances are surely remote. He will require his party to go along with him, and even the most cynical of its grandees will hesitate before throwing their country into a constitutional crisis. That, at least, is what one hopes. As with Zuma, Trump may be remembered as a president who flirted with the unthinkable before admitting defeat.
But there is a further parallel between the two men, and it is perhaps the most disturbing of all. In his quest to stay in power, Zuma tried to cleave SA in two.
With the help of Bell Pottinger and the Gupta family, he honed a story that would drive an unbridgeable chasm between SA s citizens. This was perhaps
’ his darkest and most cynical act.
He failed categorically. The story he told was not in itself uncompelling. But the naked cynicism of the one who told it shone through.
After he was ejected, his party s popularity shot up in the
’ polls. As divided as SA is, the country was largely united in its relief that he was gone.
The US, in contrast, is already cleaved into warring parts, its chasms already unbridgeable. Trump is not so much the cause of these rifts as their most spectacular symptom. Not since the Civil War has such a swathe of Americans regarded what is in the hearts of fellow citizens as
AS WITH ZUMA, TRUMP MAY BE REMEMBERED AS A PRESIDENT WHO FLIRTED WITH THE UNTHINKABLE
an existential threat.
It is the oddest spectacle, one few could have predicted. Constitutional democracy in the US is nearly a quarter of a millennium old. In SA it is barely a generation young. SA s
’ economic inequality is shocking, its racial alienation rife. And yet one would be hard pressed to say political authority in the US is any more secure than in SA. The world has truly been turned upside down.