Five things Donald Trump can learn from Rassie Erasmus as US President says he’s a great leader while Springboks boss demonstrates it
The Springboks play the All Blacks in Baltimore on Saturday, 40 miles up the road from a White House that’s spent the best part of two years telling the world South Africa is falling apart.Rassie Erasmus arrives with his 100th Test at the Springbok helm, two World Cups and a squad that looks like the country, and there’s a short course in there for a President who spent Wednesday night promising every adult citizen $5,000 if his party wins in November.The Springboks arrived in Maryland at two o’clock on Monday morning to a welcome party of expats with flags, vuvuzelas and a Shosholoza loud enough to make the place sound like OR Tambo, whilst the number of All Blacks supporters who’d bothered to set an alarm came to precisely none.By Thursday the squad were guests at the embassy in Washington, and on Saturday evening M&T Bank Stadium will stage the first Test between these two countries on American soil, with South Africa 2-1 up in the series and Erasmus reaching his 100th Test at the Springbok helm since he took over in 2018.It’s a curious place to be so warmly received, given that the President boycotted last November’s G20 summit in Johannesburg, announced on social media that South Africa would “NOT be receiving an invitation” to this year’s summit in Miami, and in May raised the refugee cap by 10,000 places for white South Africans on the strength of an emergency that Pretoria says doesn’t exist.The comparison that sells Rassie shortMy Planet Rugby colleague Danny Stephens wrote last week that Erasmus had become almost Trump-ish, and he made the case well: the throwaway soundbite that starts a fortnight’s row, the endless testing of how far the laws will stretch, the knack of bending any narrative to his own purposes.Anyone who wants to find for the prosecution has a record to work with, too, from the 62-minute video about Nic Berry’s refereeing to the posts about Wayne Barnes in 2022, both of which ended in bans.I think the label does Erasmus a disservice, though, and the best evidence is sitting in Danny’s own column, which noted that whilst Erasmus was making every headline about himself, from the team announcement to the expletives in the press room, his players barely said a word in public and went back into the laager before the next Test.Erasmus draws the fire so his squad doesn’t have to, and the storms he starts are fought on behalf of 30-odd men in green jerseys, but the noise that comes out of the White House tends to have one beneficiary, and he’s generally the man making it.The laws point cuts the same way, because everything from the 7-1 bench to the front-row changes timed to the weather sits inside World Rugby’s regulations, and when Erasmus did step outside them he served the bans. Underneath the noise, he’s spent eight years doing a set of things the man down the road in Washington has shown very little appetite for.Hire the best, even when they belong to the other lotWhen Jacques Nienaber and Felix Jones left after the 2023 World Cup, Erasmus rebuilt his coaching team with an Irishman, Jerry Flannery, running the defence, and a former All Blacks fly-half, Tony Brown, running the attack. Handing a New Zealander the keys to the Springbok backline would once have been grounds for a public inquiry in Bloemfontein, and it’s worked, with the Boks attacking better than at any point in the Erasmus era.In June, Brown signed to join the All Blacks’ staff from 2028, and Erasmus’s response was to say he’d known from the start that Brown wanted to go home eventually, to defend the decision in public and to mention that replacements were already lined up. Departures from Donald Trump’s service have tended to be marked differently: a former secretary of state became “dumb as a rock”, a former national security adviser became “a dope”, and a former defence secretary was upgraded to the world’s most overrated general.Embrace the press, and earn its respectErasmus has made a habit of naming his matchday 23 early in the week, and he gives the press room more to write about than any coach in the sport.Plenty of journalists can’t stand him, and one New Zealand pundit accused him of a God complex during this series, but they know he’ll turn up, answer the question and own it when he’s wrong. After Cape Town, he met Dave Rennie’s complaint about the Springbok scrum with a volley of expletives in a media briefing, and after Soweto he apologised for a “not well-mannered outburst” and called Rennie a gentleman, which is how you get respected by people who’d happily see you lose.The President’s approach has been three-fold: to mislead, to ban, to sue. Mostly on the basis that modern media algorithms reward the loudest over the most accurate. He’s after the New York Times for $15 billion and the BBC for $10 billion over a Panorama edit of his January 6 speech, and last month his lawyers won an emergency stay against a court deadline to hand the BBC the financial records of his business empire. The Associated Press was cut out of the White House press pool for sticking with the Gulf of Mexico, and a fortnight ago he said he’d report NBC’s Kristen Welker to the broadcast regulator for calling his endorsement record in the primaries mixed.Embrace multiculturalismIn 2018, a few months into the job, Erasmus made Siya Kolisi the first Black Test captain in the Springboks’ history, and 18 months later Kolisi lifted the Webb Ellis Cup in Yokohama, in a final in which Makazole Mapimpi scored the first try South Africa had ever managed on that stage; four years later they did it again in Paris.The side that runs out in Baltimore will look more like the country it represents than any Springbok generation before it, and the ambassador who hosted them this week, Roelf Meyer, was the National Party’s chief negotiator at the talks that ended apartheid; the man across the table from him is now the President.After the 2019 final, Erasmus made the point that pressure, in South Africa, means having no job, or having a close relative murdered, and that rugby’s job was to give people hope. Washington’s response to the same country has been to set the lowest refugee cap in American history, 7,500 places allocated primarily to Afrikaners, and then to raise it to 17,500 in May whilst the programme stays shut to almost everybody else. Pretoria denies that Afrikaners are persecuted, and the claims of a white genocide have never been substantiated by independent data.Turn up, and agree the rules before you doSA Rugby could have taken the fourth Test to Croke Park, which was on the list, and nobody would have blamed them. They took advice from Pretoria and came anyway, with the 2031 World Cup coming to America, and they’ve brought 650 of the Braai Army with them. Before anybody got on a plane, the two unions had agreed that a 2-2 series would mean a shared trophy, so the only argument left for Saturday is the one on the pitch.The United States didn’t attend the G20 in Johannesburg, the first one held in Africa, and the President then accused South Africa of refusing to hand the presidency over to a senior American; Pretoria’s answer was that it had handed the instruments to an embassy official, according to protocol, because the Americans hadn’t come. Two countries who’ve spent more than a century knocking lumps out of each other on a rugby field managed to settle the closing ceremony in advance.Deliver before you promiseErasmus took over a side that had lost 57-0 to the All Blacks in Albany six months earlier, and eight years on the Boks have won two World Cups and seven of their last nine Tests against New Zealand.He used 71 players in the first phase of this season, so youngsters such as Riley Norton and Esethu Mnebelele have been blooded alongside the double world champions, and when SA Rugby extended his contract last December he said he’d carry on “as long as the South African public wants me”.The President, with an approval rating in the 30s, has taken a different route to keeping the public onside. At the first Republican midterm convention in Dallas on Wednesday night, he promised every adult American citizen a $5,000 cheque, to be called the Trump dividend, on condition that the Republicans hold the House and the Senate in November.It would cost around $1.2 trillion, which a Tax Foundation economist reckons would swallow almost all the revenue his tariffs are projected to raise over a decade, and it would need Congress to pass it, which raises the question of why a party that already holds the White House, the House and the Senate has to win again before anybody can post the cheques.It is the third promised Trump dividend. The DOGE dividend of February 2025 was going to come out of $2 trillion of spending cuts and never arrived; the $2,000 tariff dividend promised last November went the same way, and the only one to reach anybody so far is the $1,776 paid to the armed forces in December. A government ethics expert has compared the latest to George McGovern’s 1972 promise of $1,000 a year to every American, which voters saw through on their way to handing Richard Nixon one of the biggest landslides in the country’s history.Erasmus’s contract runs until after the 2031 World Cup, which will be played in the United States, two years after the end of the current President’s second term. The simple difference is Donald Trump tells the world (and himself) he’s a great leader from dawn until dusk; Rassie Erasmus demonstrates he’s a great leader through outcome and deed precisely when it’s needed. - Planet Rugby
