For weeks now, egged on by his South African-born mega-billionaire advisor Elon Musk, U.S. President Donald Trump has been ratcheting up a campaign to inflict damage on South Africa, a country already beset with grave economic, racial, and historic problems.
Even before his inauguration, Trump threatened South Africa and other members of the BRICS international grouping with 100 percent tariffs if they pursued the creation of a new currency that would serve as an alternative to the dollar. (South Africa denied any such plans.)
Then, in one of its early moves, the Trump administration cut off aid to Pretoria in February on the pretext that it was committing “massive human rights violations” against members of its white minority population. This came in direct response to South Africa’s new land law, which allows the government to expropriate property in limited circumstances to address apartheid-era land inequality. No land has been seized under the law.
The following month, the U.S. State Department declared South Africa’s ambassador to the United States persona non grata and expelled him on short notice, accusing him of being a “race-baiting politician” who hates Trump.
But this was mere prelude to Trump’s outrageous treatment of South African President Cyril Ramaphosa at the White House on Wednesday, which was reminiscent of Trump’s confrontation in February with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. In the elaborate setup that unfolded, Trump dimmed the lights of the Oval Office to project footage purporting to show mass graves of white farmers in South Africa who, he claimed, were victims of an ongoing genocide.
This was false. The press quickly debunked the supposed evidence that Trump offered, from inaccurate footage of a burial site to a photo that was not, in fact, from South Africa, but rather the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
For his part, Ramaphosa gently rebutted Trump and brought prominent Afrikaners, the descendants of mostly Dutch migrants, to lend their testimonials in rejection of the genocide claims and plea for better relations with Washington. They spoke about South Africa’s crime problem—it has one of the world’s highest murder rates—and asked Washington for help.
Trump, who admitted no error, was not chastened and made no offers of assistance. His unacceptable behavior at the meeting can only be described as racist.
A quick look back helps explain how South Africa got to its present situation. Long past are the optimistic days that followed the end of apartheid, a system of formal white supremacist rule, in 1994. Apartheid formally endured for 46 years, but it was preceded by a far longer period of white domination over both Indigenous groups and an economy that produced enormous wealth through gold and diamond mining and other forms of extraction.
In what much of the world applauded as a kind of miracle, South Africa emerged from apartheid under the wise and generous leadership of Nelson Mandela. He had spent 27 years of a life sentence in prison—nearly six of them in solitary confinement—for his opposition to South Africa’s legally enforced racial separatism and inequality. Despite the many cruelties imposed on him, his family, and those he had struggled with to achieve justice, Mandela governed as an advocate of national unification across racial lines.
Unfortunately, what ensued was not quite miraculous. Mandela’s deep humanity, soft touch, and warmth were not enough to solve South Africa’s problems. He had shortcomings as a leader, too, with no effective strategy for boosting the economic development of a country that was the richest in Africa but among the most unequal in the world.
As a journalist who briefly covered South Africa during the Mandela years, I have long believed that its best chance at economic transformation back then was leading the economic integration of the entire southern half of the African continent, which had poor infrastructure but immense hydroelectric potential and mineral wealth. This would have given big opportunities to South Africa and its enterprises in sectors such as communications and mining while also helping the region break with a long era of Western domination that yielded little development.
Mandela, however, showed uneasiness about adopting any kind of regional leadership mantle and favored a more humble approach in engaging his neighbors, which had given decades of support to South Africa in its struggle against apartheid. His inaction squandered his country’s unique opportunity and the economic gains that might have come from it. It also helped create the vacuum that China stepped into, becoming the dominant builder and trading partner in Africa since the late 1990s.
Since then, South Africa has fallen prey to stalled economic growth, high unemployment, a decline in governance, and even worse inequality. It is also a victim of great structural imbalances in the global economy that have made rapid and sustained economic advancement rare in the so-called global south. All these factors have fueled a more quotidian crisis—a plague of violent crime—that has made South Africa into one of the most dangerous countries in the world. My own brother, who lived there for years, was robbed at gunpoint three times, including a home invasion in which he narrowly avoided being shot. The reality is that Black South Africans are overwhelmingly the victims.
Of the 26,232 murders committed last year in South Africa, a country of approximately 60 million people, only 44 were linked to farming communities, and just eight of the victims were farmers. (Trump’s baseless claims of white genocide in the country have centered on farmers.)
Nearly all of Trump’s comments during his encounter with Ramaphosa showed his deep ignorance of South Africa, but none more than his readiness to believe in white victimhood at the hands of Black people.
Why this fixation on race? Genocide is not a word that should be thrown around lightly—especially not in a world that abounds in situations of mass violence and persecution that are orders of magnitude greater than any suffering faced by white South Africans, who generally lead lives of comfort.
It helps to look beyond South Africa to make sense of this. Trump has repeatedly deplored the loss of life among Russian and Ukrainian soldiers as “horrible,” while staying silent about large-scale wartime killing in, say, Sudan.
This is a president who has sought to criminalize dissent against the Israeli military’s killing of more than 53,000 Palestinians in Gaza (though the actual number may be much higher), which human rights groups and well-qualified Jewish critics have called a genocide. Trump has shown crass indifference to the destruction of virtually all of Gaza and impassiveness in the face of ever stronger indications that Israel intends to seize the territory and banish as many Palestinians as possible. All the while, he has clung to a grotesque fantasy of turning Gaza into an exclusive real estate development for the wealthy.
Somehow, though, fabricated stories of white South Africans facing property seizures and violence are the moral outrage of the moment. It is hard to understand this except by facing the fact that Trump is an individual with a history of anti-Black racism and bias.
Trump was likely influenced by Musk, who bears deep and unresolved personal grievances about the society he grew up in amid great privilege. (Just a day before Ramaphosa visited the White House, Musk berated an interviewer at a conference in Qatar for not acknowledging South Africa’s supposedly “racist” laws.)
As Trump said during his meeting with Ramaphosa, “this is what Elon wanted.” Trump has a habit of deflecting responsibility. But in the way he received Ramaphosa and spoke about South Africa, his disregard for truth, moral numbness, and capacity for indecency rose to a level best described as obscenity. He cannot be let off so easily.
Trump’s calumnies against South Africa are of a piece with his treatment of Africa in general, a continent he has said is full of “shithole countries.” These, in turn, seem related to the president’s domestic campaign against diversity in the military, government, academia, and elsewhere. He and Musk seem to share an abiding unwillingness to understand why overcoming systems of discrimination that lasted centuries, both formal and informal, might require intentional government policies, or even why this effort might be worthwhile.
Trump, meanwhile, has openly longed for immigration from places such as Norway, all while deploring people from nonwhite countries—not just African ones—as a threat to the United States, just as Musk has inveighed against immigration to Europe from other continents.
I have used the word grotesque already here, and I am running out of adjectives to describe what is transpiring in the United States today. It is a reversion to the open racism of presidents long past—leaders such as Woodrow Wilson and Andrew Johnson, who sought to roll back the clock on recognizing the virtues and rights of people of non-European descent. This is happening in America, but it is profoundly un-American. It makes a mockery of the words in the Declaration of Independence, which proclaims that all people are created equal.
Trump’s behavior should not be lightly dismissed as boorishness. It must be recognized for what it really is: a menace to the integrity of the society that gave him the world’s most powerful platform.
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