It’s hard to select the worst week in the life of Cyril Ramaphosa, but the seven days since the local polls closed on 4 November must be right up there. 

He presided over an electoral collapse that his secretary-general, Fikile Mbalula, correctly termed “catastrophic”. Thabo Mbeki (who achieved 64% in the 2006 municipal elections to Ramaphosa’s 30% last week) offered no comfort. He advised his successor (but one) that resigning office “would be the correct thing to do”.

As President John F Kennedy ruefully said after the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961, “Victory has a hundred fathers, defeat is an orphan.”

And there are many winners from last week and one clear loser. Though in the league of the defeated, the Economic Freedom Fighters, Patriotic Alliance and Rise Mzansi jostle with the African National Congress (ANC) for the wooden spoon. The most fun statistic midst the welter from last Wednesday was the stand-out metric that in Soweto, the Freedom Front Plus outpolled Songezo Zibi’s Rise Mzansi (despite the latter’s huge financial war chest and fawning media support).

So, we should cut Ramaphosa some slack on his pre-poll prediction that the ANC would triumph in the local government elections. I feel less charitably towards last week’s even bigger loser across the oceans, United States (US) President Donald Trump.

He campaigned even more vigorously for the GOP than Ramaphosa did at home for even worse results given the binary nature of US elections.  If you don’t like the incumbent Republicans, your only choice is to vote Democrat. And as South African politics now resembles Israel (with a highly fragmented opposition), in America, Trump’s party was blown out of the water, even in Kansas, which last elected a Democrat in 1932 when Herbert Hoover was still president.

Peggy Noonan, an impeccable conservative and former speech writer for Republican presidents Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush, offered a damning verdict in The Wall Street Journal last Thursday.

She wrote: “Mr Trump was the author of the ruin … A loss of this size has many reasons; a river this raging has many sources. It was a pervasive sense of financial insecurity worsened by high prices, which are connected to the war [in Iran] but also driven by tariffs. And it was corruption.”

Indeed, Trump’s self-enrichment since 2024 was identified by voters as one of their top concerns.

Trump’s offer to “vote as if I am on the ballot” turned out to be entirely correct, though the answer he received was not to his liking.

To Ramaphosa’s credit, he accepted the results with “humility”, while Trump railed against a rigged election.

Still, when Ramaphosa was door stopped last week outside his Hyde Park polling station (where his vote did not dent the 79.4% achieved by the Democratic Alliance compared to the paltry 4.6% ANC vote) he sought a crumb of comfort from the US midterms where Democrats swept back to power in both houses of Congress.

But when he said, “The people of America have spoken, and I do think this is going to introduce a new era in world relations,” he was not reading the tea leaves accurately.

Ed Luce in the Financial Times wrote that Trump will be less a lame duck than “an angry duck”. And his appointment after his election rout of hardline nationalist Stephen Miller as his new chief of staff (the most powerful office below the president in the White House) indicates the direction of travel for the next two years.

And even though Trump hitherto had little regard for the norms and niceties of congressional oversight and has ruled largely via executive orders, in foreign policy (even with hostile majorities against him) there are the fewest constraints.

After the US election results were known, Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed this at the G20 foreign ministers’ gathering (from which South Africa was excluded): “Congress plays a role, there’s no doubt about it, but the central role belongs to the executive branch. The election result won’t influence or change the president’s directives in terms of what he was elected to do.”

It is thus likely to be a “false positive”, as they say in medicine, to imagine that the changing of the guard in Congress will lead to a change of direction of American policy towards South Africa and other areas of dispute.

On point was a post on Monday from Ofentse Donald Davhie, a foreign policy analyst. He reminded us that “every instrument the United States has used towards South Africa since February 2025 sits with the executive”. This includes visa restrictions, tariffs and our exclusion from the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA). As he notes, “Congress controls none of it.”

It’s also worth casting back to February 2024 when the House foreign affairs committee enacted the US-South Africa Bilateral Relations Review Act, the vote was won with broad Democrat support and its co-sponsor was Congressman Jared Moskowitz, a Democrat from Florida (he was re-elected last week).

The Bill has yet to go before the full House, but its provisions explicitly criticise Pretoria’s relations with Russia and China, as well as ANC interactions with Iran and Hamas and related topics. It calls on the president to review all aspects of the US relationship with South Africa.

No doubt our thoughtful ambassador in the US, Roelf Meyer, is aware of these currents. And Ramaphosa in the same interview where he miscast the meaning of the midterm election correctly stressed the importance of good relations with the US and its economic heft. Let’s hope he acts accordingly.

Tony Leon is the founding leader of the Democratic Alliance, which he led from 2000 to 2007. Prior to that he had been the leader of the Democratic Party. He was formerly a columnist at News24, a former South African ambassador to Argentina, and is the chair of Resolve Communications.