What Trump’s victory means for you, the world and SA — seven takes from Daily Maverick writers

A warning for South Africans

Rebecca Davis

“I’m so tired of you, America.”

That line from Rufus Wainwright’s Going To a Town played on a loop in my head as I switched off Donald Trump’s typically rambling victory speech and threw the TV remote on the table.

I had been expecting the result: if you took even two steps out of the liberal ecosystems on the social media platforms it was all there to see. Torrents of unabashed Trump support, from Americans of all races and cultures, parroting the same distorted talking points, like an echoey carnival hall of mirrors. The economy was better under Trump. Groceries and gas were cheaper under Trump. Foreigners respected borders more under Trump.

But it chills me to my core nonetheless, because there is absolutely no room for complacency as South Africans. Something eerily similar is happening right here, under our noses. A former president has launched a political comeback with precisely the same contours as Trump’s.

Day in, day out, MK party MPs are telling the country in Parliament how much better things were under the presidency of Jacob Zuma. They are lying, of course; we are only just taking our first shaky steps out from the ruinous legacy of the Zuma years, which utterly derailed our economic and social progress. But 2.3 million South Africans stood in a voting booth in May and chose Zuma again, just as more than 70 million Americans have now opted for a Trump do-over.

Could it happen here? Of course it could. Today is not a day for schadenfreude.

Much to be grateful for — in South Africa

Ferial Haffajee

I come from a part of Johannesburg where there are communities from more than 40 different countries: Somalia, Malawi, Ethiopia, Lebanon, Egypt and Palestine, to name a few. It’s a melting pot and there is a sense of community — imperfect and not without grumbles, but community nonetheless.

Xenophobes get what-for from an activist civil society and the courts in South Africa. None of the parties with an overtly anti-immigration stance won great gains in the 2024 election.

Women, peoples’ and reproductive rights are enshrined in our Constitution and outside of the ACDP, no political party has sought to imperil the right to bodily autonomy. The right to gendered equality is enshrined in the apex law and while it is still an aspiration, we would not allow any politician to turn this right and aspiration into a punching bag as happened so breathtakingly in the crude and cruel US election campaign.

Dignity is another constitutional cornerstone here that is constantly being defined and shaped by our Constitutional Court which is independent, non-partisan and jealously so. Dignity was set alight so many times by Trump that I’ve lost horrified count.

Our system of social solidarity is the largest in the developing world and something we can be (more) proud of.

Our president is a feminist with a feminist wife. (Don’t believe me? Look at his speeches on women.) Cyril Ramaphosa is described in ways that are often not flattering (because we’re free), but I’ve never heard close aides call him “fascist” as have several of Trump’s past officials in the past month.

Turning the gaze home from the seismic outcome of the US election, I see so much to build on here and so much to be grateful for.

If there is one thing people are, it’s consistent 

Zukiswa Pikoli

I can think of nothing worse than being a black woman in the US right now. What a lonely and scary place to be with Trump gleefully at the helm, teeth bared and ready to “Make America Healthy Again” (a slogan attributed to Robert F Kennedy Jr) while claiming a Machiavellian victory that he says will take the US on a path of “healing” — whatever that means.

The contested terrain of women’s bodies marks an alarming return to conservatism rooted in the destructive ideology of patriarchy and capitalism that sees women merely as possessions to be bent to men’s will as a form of societal control and ordering.

This is not to say that while Kamala Harris may appear to be the better devil, her politics are beyond reproach. Her stance on Israel is also a scary prospect for someone on the political margins.

Anyway, an electorate gets the president they vote for, right? For progressive black women in the US, choosing one of the two presidential candidates must have been suffocatingly difficult.

What this election has shown us is that when in doubt, Americans go to ground and revert to the good old American principles of protectionism and nationalism. Everyone else who finds themselves outside of that, well, sorry for you!

Time to build global solidarity to reduce insecurity for everyone

Richard Poplak

So anyway, that happened. Again.

We must now admit the obvious: an order has finally fallen. There’s no point pretending any longer — post-Second World War American liberalism has shat the bed. A quick tally of the mass murders to date? Sure, why not? Vietnam, Indonesia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Angola, Israel, the list never ends. (As the academic Samuel Moyn put it, “Cold War liberalism was a catastrophe — for liberalism.”)

When the mass killing stopped, the borders came down — not for people, but for capital. It’s passe to bang on about neoliberalism, but I think (hope?) it should be clear that the version of globalisation promoted by liberals in both the Republican and Democratic parties gutted out America’s centre too brutally and too rapidly.

As a result, liberalism’s fundamental notion of egalitarianism was forsaken, while an emphasis on equity — code for moving the deck chairs around the Titanic of elite media/academic/corporate institutions — functioned as a fig leaf for social stagnation. The rich got richer. And then richer. And then richer still. Everyone else got angry.

Read more: AmeriKKKa on full electoral-historical display – what will die first and most painfully is the ‘idea’ of America

It’s embarrassing to think anyone could have fallen for American liberalism’s manifold lies. Progressives who did cry foul were shouted down and assured that the stalwart realpolitik of the Nixon/Ford/Kissinger/Reagan/Bushes era would prevail. We were told to grow the fuck up, and indeed we did.

Now it’s time for liberals to do the same. Their world has collapsed, in favour of a techbro oligarchy that is premised on puerile resistance to the Libs — which means saying the quiet part of America’s secret fascist incantations out loud. Very loud.

Make no mistake, what comes next will be ugly. Few of the extant issues will be solved by doge coins, by white people breeding more, or by driving migrants into the sea. (Said migrants, it should be noted, who hail from the same countries that were destabilised by the US’s endless anti-narco, anti-commie campaigns over the past five decades.)

But these are not the first days of American fascism — because American fascism has always existed. It just wasn’t evenly distributed. Instead, this is the first day of building global solidarity for what comes next — an order based on reducing insecurity for everyone, equally, without coddling timorous elites. It’s time for building coalitions based not on Nazi fetishism, but on something more lasting.

You’ll notice I haven’t used the candidates’ names. That’s because they don’t matter.

You do.

Into the unknown, where anything could happen

Stephen Grootes

The re-election of Trump is a reminder of how important longer trends are in democratic politics. Food prices matter; when they go up the government of the day suffers. This was true for the ANC earlier this year and it was true for the French Revolution.

In the US, which suffered very high inflation during Joe Biden’s term, this rule appears to have held yet again. It is still the economy, stupid.

But what about the longer term?

Demography is supposed to be destiny, which would mean that if Trump’s strength is that his supporters oppose the fact the US is no longer a white-majority country, this is just a blip.

Eventually that demography should push the US to become fully diverse — except that there is evidence Trump won votes from Hispanic groups. As The Economist has suggested, this is part of a longer-term trend away from ethnic and racial identities to social and cultural identities.

Meanwhile, it seems anything is now possible.

It’s like the end of the Zuma era. In 2016 and 2017 it felt like anything could happen; he could be removed from office or become president for life. The same is true for the US.

Trump could be president for a full term and really change the country’s direction fundamentally. Or he could impose his tariffs, plunge the world into another Great Depression and be turfed out as the US swings dramatically to the left.

Anything feels possible.

Trump and SA business: The good fortune of being too small to care about

Tim Cohen

It’s an obvious question with an uncertain answer: what will a Trump victory mean for South African business?

The most tempting answer is that it will mean very little. Trump’s interest and knowledge about not only South Africa but the continent as a whole is palpably minuscule; his focus has somewhat understandably been on the US’s up-and-coming rival China, followed to a certain extent by Europe, and then at a distance the Middle East and South America. Africa just doesn’t feature.

The focus on China is responsible for one of Trump’s very rare, clear economic policy positions: support for higher tariffs, particularly against countries with a net trade surplus vs the US, of which China is by far the most egregious example.

Trump hasn’t expressed himself during the campaign on the two most important concrete US policies that affect SA: the US President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (Pepfar) which provides substantial financial support for health programmes, and the African Growth and Opportunity Act (Agoa).

However, since both programmes were maintained during his previous term, they seem likely to continue, although support for Agoa, essentially a tariff-free grant to African countries, does grate against his broad mercantilism and his right-wing tilt. He might seek to renegotiate Agoa’s terms to focus on reciprocal trade benefits.

Oddly, the US competition with China might help ensure these policies are maintained, out of a US concern that its position on the continent is threatened, which of course it is.

In a broader sense, the conventional wisdom now is that a Trump presidency, and more importantly a Republican-dominated legislature, will result in a stronger US stock market, a stronger dollar, a weaker bond market, and higher inflation. In an indirect way, these will all have an effect on SA business. For importers in general, the news is bad; for exporters, the news is good.

But all of these movements are yet to play out and could easily be influenced by other global events. US stock markets have responded positively to Trump’s victory, based perhaps on his pro-business credentials. However, historically, the US economy has grown at more or less the same pace whichever party is in power.

For Trump’s opponents in business and society, that is something of a consolation prize to hold on to.

It’s bad news for SA’s economy

Ed Stoddard

The return of Trump to the White House is bad news for South Africa’s economy. Trump’s obsession with tariffs as a panacea for the US economy — which is not in bad shape overall — will be poisonous for trade and by extension the global economy.

The roughly 13,000 jobs at risk if Agoa is torpedoed or South Africa is excluded from it are just the tip of the iceberg. Four years of chaos, uncertainty, stupidity and rising geopolitical tensions are a major if not existential global economic risk.

In the first indication of the impact a second Trump term will have on South Africa’s economy, the rand tanked on Wednesday morning and bond yields spiked. Emerging market assets are often the first casualty of risk aversion among investors. This may help gold maintain its record price rally — it thrives on chaos — but the precious metal’s importance to the South African economy is a fraction of what it once was.

Platinum group metals prices, which have been depressed, recently got a boost when the Biden administration asked its allies in the Group of Seven to mull imposing sanctions on Russian palladium exports. A Trump administration may not follow through on that. One silver lining for the South African economy could be falling oil prices as Trump is going to open the floodgates on US oil production. DM