Trump Was Right to Shame South African President

In one of the most incredible scenes in American diplomatic history, President Donald Trump halted his meeting with the South African president Wednesday to show him a video montage of threats made to white citizens of his country.

“Boer” refers to an Afrikaner, a descendant of mostly Dutch immigrants in South Africa.

This meeting took place a week after Trump welcomed around 60 white South African refugee farmers to the United States, a move that received blowback from the Left and the media who until a moment ago insisted that all refugees are welcome.

I wonder what was different this time?

Funny enough, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa is the one who requested a meeting with Trump to get him to stop bringing in Afrikaner refugees and to keep U.S. aid flowing after the administration suspended it in March.

Perhaps Ramaphosa expected Trump to kiss his feet like other presidents have done.

He thought wrong.

Now, normally I’d say that it’s unwise to humiliate the leaders of any nation during a public meeting, even those of a generally noxious government. But in this instance, what Trump did was entirely deserved and sent the right message.

If you take a gander at the laundry list of legacy media headlines, they claim no genocide is taking place and eagerly insinuate that Trump is racist for highlighting the Afrikaner issue. They’re more bothered by Trump “ambushing” Ramaphosa in the Oval Office than by Ramaphosa’s ignoring the slaughter of his citizens in their homes. Some praised Ramaphosa for “staying calm” through videos of his countrymen singing to massive crowds, “kill the Boer, kill the white farmer.”

What a statesman.

Trump is right to pull U.S. aid from South Africa. And if we are going to bring any refugees at all to the United States, the Afrikaner farmers have an excellent claim.

For too long, South Africa’s leaders have been unquestioningly feted and treated with deference by Western leaders.

The Left has built up this unquestioned narrative that after Nelson Mandela liberated South Africa from apartheid and racism the country has moved along toward its wonderful post-racial future, the only impediment being white racism.

That’s not at all what happened. Yes, apartheid was ended. Racism wasn’t. It’s now being viciously directed toward the country’s white minority, especially the farmers. South Africa is being decolonized. But the result hasn’t been equality, growth, prosperity, and happiness. It’s been retribution, crime, decay, dysfunction, and misery.

I’d say South Africa’s government is paving a road to hell through good intentions, but their intentions are malignant, and the roads aren’t getting paved either.

The arc of history bends toward justice under a just system, where citizens are treated equally under the law, where God-given rights are protected, and where the government commits itself to safeguarding all its citizens, not just ones of a particular class or racial group.

South Africa didn’t take that path. They chose social justice and the road to oblivion. They chose racial retribution and DEI-maxing. The country is run by a socialist, Marxist-aligned, black nationalist-adjacent party that’s long tried to juggle South Africa’s growth with outright theft from its productive sectors. The parasite is finally killing the host.

Palladium Magazine published an article in March highlighting how South Africa has become a “racketeer party state,” where the allegedly “moderate” ruling party, African National Congress, essentially operates a gangster-style government.

“From endemic sexual crime to farm murders, rolling blackouts, and expropriation, the rest is just the details,” Lawrence Thomas wrote. “What has come to be termed ‘South Africanization’ is not the failed development of a Third-World nation such as Afghanistan or Somalia, but the structural de-development of a once fully modern state that had its own nuclear weapons program.”

Thomas wrote that “the party operates on a kind of folk Leninism: it invokes the grandiose language of twentieth-century party discipline to steer what amounts to a racketeering operation with a malleable progressive ideology attached that justifies the racket.”

The “kill the Boer” rallies are only part of the problem. South Africa passed a law that allows the property of white farmers to be taken by the government. One New York Times writer absurdly tried to compare this to the Trump administration’s use of eminent domain on the Southern border.

Eminent domain is a justified—if sometimes abused—use of government power to build infrastructure that comes with compensation. South Africa’s law comes with no compensation. It’s simple, state-backed robbery and retribution.

To make matters worse as far as U.S. policy is concerned, this all occurred while South Africa aligned itself with Russia, China, Iran, and Hamas. They take our money and work with our enemies.

Of course, the Biden administration did nothing to fix the situation. Orde F. Kittrie, an official at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, wrote last March in The Hill that while the African National Congress was looting its own country, the U.S. was “insulating the party” from the consequences of its corruption and mismanagement.

“The U.S. is the largest provider of development assistance to South Africa, $660 million per year,” Kittrie wrote. “The U.S. has also committed more than $1 billion to help South Africa’s profoundly corrupt and reform-resistant energy sector transition to renewable energy.”

Again, the Trump administration rightly brought this to an end. We shouldn’t be funding green scams at home or abroad.

That South Africa’s president was humiliated by the White House was the least of his problems. If Ramaphosa would like to avoid such embarrassments in the future he should work to end corruption in his government, protect the rights of all his citizens, and stop linking arms with terrorist groups.

Then maybe he can come crawling back to the U.S. and ask for help.

Until that time, he and his entire government can slink away and watch as more future Elon Musks flee to places that allow them to create their own greener pastures without threat of violence and expropriation.

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