David Frum, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, suggested President Donald Trump was testing a new White House “reality show” on Wednesday with his conspiracy-fueled remarks to South African President Cyril Ramaphosa.
“‘Surprise the World Leader,’ where world leaders will come for prizes or else they’ll get a goat behind curtain number three if they’re on the president’s bad mood,” said Frum of the imaginary TV show during a CNN appearance.
“So we’ve had bad surprises for Zelenskyy and Ramaphosa, but maybe there’s a nice surprise for you!”
Wednesday’s Oval Office meeting between Trump and Ramaphosa has been widely described as an “ambush” by the U.S. president, who pushed unfounded claims of a “white genocide” in South Africa while flipping through printouts of alleged news stories describing attacks on white farmers in the country.
Trump, at one point in the meeting, called attention to a TV wheeled into the room before playing a video that he claimed supported the theory.
CNN’s Larry Madowo, earlier on the network, noted that “almost everything” Trump said “was inaccurate or immediately debunked.”
Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic, noted that he worked on similar meetings in the Oval Office, which are expected to be “choreographed,” and any “areas of disagreement are supposed to be quite small.”
“They are to be worked out at the highest level, and the meetings are there for a purpose. In this case, the president just sandbagged somebody,” Frum said of Wednesday’s meeting.
He added that the U.S. has “serious disagreements” with South Africa, particularly the country’s ongoing case before the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.
“But on the farmers? Ramaphosa is in trouble at home from the person quoted in that video [Trump played] because he has been a friend to commercial farmers, many of them white,” Frum continued.
