Trump takes aim at the Rainbow Nation
South Africa has been behaving ‘VERY BADLY’ – and might end up paying a real price.
Simon Allison in Johannesburg
It is not hard to understand why the new United States government is unhappy with its counterpart in South Africa.
The first issue is South Africa’s legal case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, which was the most serious attempt by any country to hold Israel accountable for war crimes and potential genocide committed in Gaza. This embarrassed both Israel and its allies – most prominent among them the US.
The second issue is South Africa’s alleged embrace of Russia and China, the US’ key geopolitical rivals. Evidence for this includes South Africa’s membership of the Brics+ bloc; its increasing economic ties with China; and the case of the “Lady R”, a sanctioned Russian cargo ship that docked in Simon’s Town in 2022.
(South Africa maintains even closer relationships with Western countries: the US is its second-largest trading partner and it conducts military exercises with both the US and European powers.)
The third issue is perhaps the most pertinent – and may explain the level of vitriol being directed towards the country. Trump touched on it earlier this week in a post that threatened an indefinite freeze on all aid to the country. “South Africa is confiscating land, and treating certain classes of people VERY BADLY,” he wrote on a social media network he owns.
Elon Musk, Trump’s closest adviser and the richest man in the world, said the quiet part out loud when he reposted several outright lies on X, the social media platform he owns. These included demonstrably false claims that “White South Africans are being persecuted for their race in their home country” and that “racial quotas” are being used to deprive white farmers of water access.
These claims have repeatedly been debunked; nonetheless, they persist and are turbocharged in right-wing echo chambers like X. The persecution of white people is a thread that underpins much of Trump’s populist politics. In the absence of any real evidence for such persecution, that evidence must be invented.
