Bill, the poor, the former, burpah,

pa, pa,

ever since the death of Nelson Mandela, it's fair to call Cyril Ramaphoso,

one of the few surviving founding fathers of post-apartheid South Africa. He helped to write the

country's new constitution, which would supposedly usher in a new era of prosperity and equality. He also

oversaw the transition to the new government. And as South Africa descended into lawlessness and

squalor over the ensuing 30 years, Ramaphosa gradually accumulated more wealth and power until he finally became the country's president in 2018.

He's currently worth something like half a billion dollars, even as the vast majority of South Africans now live in extreme poverty.

What this means is that Ramaphosa is the personification of South Africa's post-colonial experiment.

When he drafted the new constitution,

he presumably did not foresee that by 2025, the country would have the single highest unemployment

rate of any country in the world at 40%. He certainly didn't tell anyone that he eventually

planned to sign new laws that would disenfranchise and rob white farmers or that white people

would be systematically slaughtered in their homes. But all that has happened. And yet for all this time,

no one, and certainly no world leader has held this deranged despot accountable for any of that.

Instead, it's been something of a tradition in Washington to pretend that South Africa is somehow

a great ally to the United States

and to treat Ramaphosa as royalty, as Joe Biden did a few years ago. But that tradition came to a

very abrupt end yesterday in the Oval Office when Donald Trump did something that no other political

figure has ever done. He told Ramaphosa to his face in the most public form imaginable that he's a fraud

who is overseeing a white genocide. And in the process, Trump took a blowtorch to a mythology

that pretty much every politician from both parties has been desperate to uphold for several

...