Among the billboards that greet passengers arriving at Johannesburg’s O.R. Tambo airport is an advertisement for the Bank of China, which is among that country’s largest state-owned financial institutions.
“Bridging China-Africa cooperation with tailor-made financial solutions,” the sign reads.
The message reminded me of a discussion about Donald Trump with my seatmate, a man from Namibia (or Nambia, as Trump called it) in his fifties, on a flight to Johannesburg from New York, a day after the president, during a meeting at the White House with lawmakers, reportedly disparaged immigrants from Africa and Haiti.
Trump debases the presidency, we agreed, “and he doesn’t do anything for economic growth,” added my seatmate, who, as it happens, manages the port at Walvis Bay, one of the busiest ports in Africa.
The tonnage at the port ebbs and flows with trade. If you run a port, the more trade, the better.
I asked my seatmate how in his experience, the U.S. in Africa compares with China in Africa. “The Chinese are out to make money,” he said. “They want to have the world’s biggest economy.”
If that’s China’s goal, Trump is providing an assist. Add to his latest remarks the ways – from withdrawing the Paris climate agreement and the Trans Pacific Partnership to embracing a travel ban that discriminates against Muslims – that Trump is isolating the U.S. at the same time as China ups its engagement with the world.
“To have insulted an entire continent in the most vile terms is manifestly harmful to our interests,” Reuben Brigety II, who was U.S. ambassador to the African Union from 2013 to 2015, told the Times.
The businessman who penned “The Art of the Deal” has yet to show he can be an opportunist when it comes to pursuing opportunities for anyone, including the U.S., besides himself. (Credit Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who in a 2016 interview, called Trump “a faker.”)
En route to Johannesburg, I read “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” the best-seller by Michael Wolff that claims to reveal the inside dope on the dysfunction that marked the administration’s first 100 days.
Commenting on what he terms the episodes of “ohmygodness” that emanate from Trump daily, “it is worth considering,” notes Wolff,” the possibility that this constant, daily often more than once-a-day pileup of events – each one canceling out the one before – is the true aberration and novelty at the heart of the Trump presidency.”
At the White House meeting, Trump reportedly used the word “sh*#hole” as an adjective to describe Haiti and some nations in Africa.
The comment generated a wave of revulsion and followed a year of Trump’s debasing the presidency with appeals to racists, a disregard of presidential norms against self-dealing, attacks on judges and a worldview that appears to be informed solely by cable news.
The word “sh*#hole” does not appear in the Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary. It’s profanity and slang, I suppose. Of course, racism does appear in the dictionary and, of the time of this writing, was the third most looked up word in the past 24 hours. (You can find “sh*#hole” in Urban Dictionary.)
In the wake of Trump’s comment, people the world over took to Facebook and Twitter to call him out by, among other things, noting their living in places such as “South Shi*#hole” or, to ask, as the writer Peter Godwin did, whether “Nambia is a shi*#hole.”
Anyone know if #Nambia is a #Shithole?
— Peter Godwin (@petergodwin) January 12, 2018
As the posts suggest, the Trump presidency demands vigilance against what Masha Gessen, writing in The New Yorker, calls “the ongoing degradation of the public sphere.”
The news, Gessen notes, is not that the president “is a foul-mouthed racist – we knew that… the news is that he insists on dragging the rest of us down with him.” (David Leonhardt and Ian Prasad Philbrick of the Times have attempted to compile a definitive list of Trump’s racist comments, dating to his years in New York and continuing through his asserting that the nation’s first black president was not born in the U.S.).
We can choose not to be degraded – to show the self-respect that is beyond the president. As the spokeswoman for African Union Chairperson Moussa Faki, noted, “The United States of America is a big country and the United States of America goes beyond just one man or one statement.”
