THE world underestimated how extreme Donald Trump's delusions of grandeur are. His authoritarian domestic actions and blatant extortion and disregard for other countries' sovereignty as demonstrated in his first two weeks as president are still going to upend the world.
Along with Mexico, Canada and China, South Africa is clearly a target of the Trump administration. And we are going to feel the pain.
The chances of the Agoa trade agreement being renewed later this year must now be considered close to zero. The support for HIV/Aids initiatives and for research at South African universities is also largely likely to be suspended.
A former diplomat who served America in South Africa for a few years told me he believes Trump is going to do everything in his power to undermine South Africa's chairmanship of the influential G20 club of countries and unless something changes drastically, he is going to boycott the summit of G20 leaders in Johannesburg in November.
Trump targets no other country in Africa; not one of the many dictatorships, human rights abusers or one-party states. Only the strongest democracy on the continent with the open-most society and the best constitution, which is not being tampered with; the country with a government of national unity across wide ideological and demographic divides.
Trump was asked pertinently during an impromptu press conference at the weekend: “Are you planning to cut aid to other South African nations?" His answer was: “No, it's only South Africa."
Hy went on: “Terrible things are happening in South Africa. The leadership is doing some terrible things, horrible things. So it’s under investigation right now; we’ll make a determination.
“Until such time we find out what South Africa is doing … they’re taking away land, they’re confiscating, they’re taking away land and actually they are doing things that are perhaps far worse than that.”
The law does not allow confiscation
Enough people, including Pres. Cyril Ramaphosa, have already thoroughly pointed out that the trigger for Trump's outburst, the Expropriation Act, in no way allows the confiscation of land and is largely in line with similar expropriation practices in the US itself (“eminent domain") and in other Western democracies. Section 25 (1) of the Constitution states: “No one may be deprived of property except in terms of a generally applicable legal provision, and no legal provision may authorise arbitrary deprivation of property."
Trump probably does not understand that South Africa is a constitutional democracy; that, unlike in the US, every law and act of the state can be taken to the constitutional court to be tested for constitutionality and rationality. He probably also does not know that, unlike in the USA, the judges of the highest court are not appointed according to their party-political affiliations.
Not a single inch of land has been confiscated or expropriated without compensation in South Africa since 1994. (During his first term, Trump did expropriate large tracts of land to build his wall along the Mexican border.)
The hand of the South African-born super-rich entrepreneur Elon Musk, Trump's “First Buddy", can clearly be detected in the latest saga and he was also engaged in a verbal fight on his Twitter/X with Ramaphosa's spokesperson this week about “all the racist laws".
Musk has aligned himself with far-right political parties and movements in Britain, Germany and elsewhere in the last few months.
The other person involved is the man on the shortlist for ambassador to South Africa, Joel Pollak. As senior editor at the alt-right propaganda paper Breitbart News, he is very influential in MAGA circles and regularly writes about South Africa.
Pollak was born in Johannesburg but grew up in Chicago. He studied at the University of Cape Town and between 2002 and 2006 was speechwriter for the then DA leader, Tony Leon. He says he is a personal friend of the DA's Helen Zille and he and his South African wife, Julia Bertelsman, were married in 2009 in the Western Cape prime minister's residence, Leeuwenhof.
In November of 2024, shortly after Trump's election victory, Pollak wrote on politicsweb.co.za that Trump has “an opportunity to make South Africa Great again", but then the country had to turn its back on the “bad guys" – Russia, China, Iran and “other pariahs" – and support the West unconditionally.
Pollak – and it shows who he is talking to here – also demanded that the commando system be reinstated to prevent farm killings.
Trump’s Africa advisers
The leader of the Solidarity Movement, Flip Buys, issued a statement on Monday that provides clues that this Afrikaner rights organisation is involved in the latest Trump threats. It would appear that Buys counts his movement as being among Trump's “Africa advisers".
“Trump is also currently being encouraged by advisers in the White House to take a stand on minority rights in South Africa," says Buys. “This follows, among other things, reports on the extent of racial discrimination against minorities in South Africa, the extent of farm attacks and murders in the past three decades and the signing of the Bela Act."
Buys then adds: “Trump has been thoroughly briefed on this by his African advisers in the past few days." (Who are they, Flip? And how do you know what they told Trump?)
When it became clear on Monday that Trump's threat that he would stop all support to South Africa could seriously harm the country, the leader of AfriForum, Kallie Kriel, reacted quickly. He announced that his movement would write to the Trump administration and ask that only ANC leaders be punished, and not the people of South Africa. (I only heard Kallie's voice over the radio about this, so I couldn't see if his face was red with shame at this absurdity.)
Buys tells it just a little differently: “The Solidarity Movement is going to ask the Trump administration to put pressure on the ANC's policies, but not to punish ordinary South Africans through measures that cause greater unemployment or harm the defenceless."
Buys makes it clear that he has good connections with the Trump administration: “The Solidarity Movement is planning a series of diplomatic performances that include talks with local diplomats and visits to the White House." (The Flip and Donald Show?)
I have pointed out more than once in this space the predictable consequences of Solidarity's campaigns to seek support abroad against the South African government.
The movement's Ernst Roets likes to boast how highly he is regarded by far-right groups in Europe – he is almost an honorary citizen of Hungary – and the alt-right in America. He has been a guest several times on the podcasts of one of Trump's political mentors, Tucker Carlson, and on Fox News.
Lengthy tirade
Theo de Jager, chairman of the board of Solidarity's agricultural partner Saai (South Africa Agri Initiative), added grist to the mill. Trump's threats are not good news, he says in a Saai video, but farmers understand the sentiment behind it.
After a lengthy tirade about the ANC's friendships with countries such as Russia and China, policies that go against the universal charter of human rights, farm murders and “raw racial discrimination in both the workplace and the market", De Jager asks: “If you do not plan to take our land without paying us for it, why do you pass an act that empowers the state to do so?" (Could it be that Dr. De Jager did not read or understand the provisions of the law?)
De Jager is one of minister of agriculture and DA leader John Steenhuisen's confidants and advisers.
Between this lot and crazies like the minister of mineral and petroleum resources, Gwede Mantashe, who this week said if Trump didn't want to give us money, we shouldn't sell our minerals to him, we are in a pickle, dear fellow citizens.
Max du Preez is the editor-in-chief of Vrye Weekblad. He was the founding editor of the original Vrye Weekblad.
Vrye Weekblad is a progressive Afrikaans national weekly newspaper that was launched in November 1988 and forced to close in 28 May 1994, then relaunched as an online newspaper in 2019. The paper was noted for its anti-apartheid stance making it a notable outlier in the Afrikaans language media of the 1980s and early 1990s.The paper was initially driven into bankruptcy by the legal costs of defending its charge that South African Police General Lothar Neethling had supplied poison to security police to kill activists.
It was relaunched in a digital format on 6 April 2019 by Arena Holdings, with Max du Preez returning as editor and Anneliese Burgess as co-editor. A new edition is published every Friday on the Vrye Weekblad website.
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