MAY 22, 2025 – If you were mildly paying attention to yesterday’s news cycle, you saw, heard or read about our president’s unpresidential treatment of Cyril Ramaphosa, president of the Republic of South Africa. Sadly, our president’s unbecoming ambush of his guest came as no surprise. It was yet another outburst by a world leader with the emotional quotient of a troubled five-year-old.
In a carefully staged presentation, Trump . . . prompted by Musk and actively facilitated by Miller . . . made a staggeringly lame case that Afrikaners are the target of genocide. Putting all biases aside, the show was no more factually rigorous or probative than a KKK attempt to “prove” Black-on-white genocide by showing a KKK-produced propaganda video of race riots in the 1960s with a soundtrack featuring profane Rap music and Marvin X[1] reciting his poem, “Burn Baby Burn” (written shortly after the L.A. Watts Riots in August 1965 to express the systemic oppression of African-Americans). Ignored in yesterday’s crassly staged Oval Office confrontation were (a) the legal definition of “genocide”—critical in evaluating the legal basis for granting refugee status; (b) the distinction between deliberate governmental oppression, on the one hand, and on the other, criminal behavior by non-governmental persons; (c) the history of apartheid in South Africa;[2] and (d) the numbers:
Total Population of RSA (all races): 63.2 million.
Whites (including Afrikaners): 4.5 million (7.3% of the total population)
Afrikaners (whites with lineage to the “Boers” (farmers) who migrated to South Africa in earlier centuries, mostly from Holland): 2.7 million (just under 4% of the total population; 60% of the white population; Afrikaners are primarily rural; the rest of the white population is mostly urban)
Afrikaners who’ve expressed a desire to emigrate: 70,000 (just under 3% of Afrikaners).
Land ownership in RSA: Whites – 80%; Non-whites – 20% (in contrast to population percentages (see above).
When asked point blank if he really believed that genocide was going on in South Africa, our president answered, “I don’t know,” oblivious to the irony.
The absence of an evidence-supported fact-based argument by Trump is the norm, not the exception. He doesn’t present a case by way of facts and reasoning. He’s simply a human volcano that spews forth steam, pumice, and lava. Whatever rumbles, fills the sky with ash and pours liquid B.S. over his base is what counts in his world. Genocide in South Africa? He doesn’t know or care. It doesn’t matter.
What matters to Trump are two typically shallow objectives: 1. Feeding red meat to the MAGA base; and 2. Sociopathic retribution against his political opponents, who, in a typical authoritarian construct, are his political enemies.
The charge of genocide is so preposterous, it doesn’t warrant any response here beyond what I’ve provided above. The claim, coupled with the red carpet treatment of the 59 white “refugees” from South Africa, serves as prime-graded filet mignon to the overtly white supremacist Christian nationalist element of Trump’s MAGA base. Little in the imaginations of those folks could top the straight-up racist circus Trump directed yesterday from the Oval Office.
But from how Trump has conducted himself over the past decade—and from what we’ve all witnessed, unfiltered—I strongly suspect, however, that this bizarre creature derives far greater gratification from watching Democrats go out of their minds over his royal treatment of the 59 Afrikaners who were granted elevated and expedited refugee status. The icing on that retributive cake was Trump’s shamelessly humiliating public conduct toward the RSA president in the Oval Office yesterday.
If I were an Afghan who’d hitched my wagon to Americans in Kabul and was then abandoned by the U.S. as we beat a hasty retreat in 2021; or a displaced Syrian waiting for the stars to align to get myself and family to the U.S and start anew; or a young Venezuelan who’d fled a failed state and had risked life and limb to get to the Rio Grande, only now to be rounded up by ICE and sent to a prison in El Salvador . . . if I were any of those or thousands more like them, I’d be seething with anger over the administration’s favored treatment of the Afrikaners, whose admission to America was administered with great fanfare against a backdrop of concocted charges of genocide, and . . . who had tons of luggage. As an American citizen whose parents sponsored refugees to this country; who himself has helped resettle refugees and who knows many other American citizens who’ve assisted refugees—and is personally familiar with the stories of refugees who’d been stripped not only of their property, their livelihood, and worst of all, their dignity as human beings . . . as such an American, I am ashamed, embarrassed, and outraged by Trump’s red-meat retributive MAGA stunt, using Afrikaners as his convenient puppets.
What worries me beyond the immediate circus grounds, however, is our declining status in the world. Serious people around the globe look at this latest in a pattern of cruel and callous actions by Trump and his minions—official and unofficial—and no longer have trust or confidence in America. It will take a generation—or more, if ever—to repair our reputation among nations.
In our myopic impatience, we allowed a charlatan, a con-artist, a vacuous and self-styled “deal-maker” to occupy the Oval Office and represent us here and abroad. We will pay a heavy price as long as the Trump team is at bat. The aggregate cost will accrue interest at a crippling rate and will become due and payable in erratic burdensome amounts on unpredictable occasions. Yesterday’s Oval Office meeting with President Ramaphosa added to that cost. How many more costs will be added before we are brave enough to free ourselves from Tyrant Trump?
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© 2025 by Eric Nilsson
[1] Not to be confused with Malcom X, who was killed in February 1965.
[2] By law adopted in 1948, the separation of the races. The overt racism behind the policy was infamously summarized by the Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, who said (among numberless other outrages), “blacks should never be shown the greener pastures of education.”
