That officials in President Donald Trump’s administration not only discussed the March 15 attack on Yemen on unsecured messaging platform Signal, but also accidentally included The Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg in the chat is the Big Joker of government f*ckups. At the very least, it’s the Ace of Spades, but it’s also a tiresome continuation of more than two months of uncut bullshit from these people.
The leak will dominate the news cycle all week, but I don’t want it to overshadow another development in which Trump makes his feelings about Black people clear through his sympathy for white people in South Africa. According to a Feb. 7 executive order, Trump says the U.S. “shall promote the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation.”
On March 20, the U.S. Embassy in Cape Town, South Africa, claimed it received more than 67,000 names of whites who said they’d like to take Trump up on his offer. Exactly who these people are is unclear, as none of them have officially applied. Still, it’s ironic that Trump is beckoning white people from half a world away who may have nothing to contribute, while he is feverishly working to rid America of non-whites who have been working, boosting the economy, and paying taxes most of their lives.
“As long as South Africa continues to support bad actors on the world stage and allows violent attacks on innocent disfavored minority farmers, the United States will stop aid and assistance to the country,” Trump wrote, declaring an assistance freeze to the country in response to its Expropriation Act, which repeals the 1975 policy and makes up for the 1913 Natives Land Act, which took land from Black South Africans.
At the time of Trump’s offer, to their credit, the Afrikaners said “nah, we good.”
“Our members work here, and want to stay here, and they are going to stay here,” said Dirk Hermann, head of the Afrikaner trade union Solidarity, according to the Associated Press. He was right. They had been in South Africa for generations, and despite the politics, had built their lives there.
The Expropriation Act, enacted by President Cyril Ramaphosa simply appropriates land where it is not being used or where it would benefit the public. But let Trump tell it, Afrikaners’ land, which their ancestors rightfully held for centuries, was wrested from their hands.
Mind you, according to The New York Times, whites make up 7 percent of the population but own half of the land. They also hold an unchanged wealth advantage since the end of apartheid – you know, old South Africa’s system of anti-Black institutionalized oppression.
That doesn’t seem to matter to Trump, whose cohort Elon Musk was raised benefiting from apartheid. To this president, the South African law “blatantly discriminates against ethnic minority Afrikaners.”
Meanwhile, the White House ejected South African ambassador Ebrahim Rasool on March 21 because he said in a webinar that global far-right agitation is a move “to project white victimhood,” which could not be more true.
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Madison J. Gray is a New York-based journalist. He blogs at www.starkravingmadison.com.