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WHO IS BEHIND TRUMP’S INTIMIDATION OF SOUTH AFRICA?  
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Max Du Preez
February 7, 2025
Vrye Weekblad
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_ Donald Trump's bizarre, fact-free threat against South Africa did
not just arise in the back of his head last week. It is the initiative
of alt-right ex-South Africans in America and like-minded people here
(in South Africa) who are urging them on. _

, Angela Tuck

 

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.”

See for yourself. [[link removed]]

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
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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
[[link removed]], 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
[[link removed]] Afrikaans
[[link removed]] national
[[link removed]] weekly newspaper
[[link removed]] that was launched in
November 1988 and forced to close in 28 May 1994, then relaunched as
an online newspaper
[[link removed]] in 2019. The paper
was noted for its anti-apartheid
[[link removed]] stance making it a notable
outlier in the Afrikaans language media of the 1980s and early
1990s.The paper was initially driven into bankruptcy
[[link removed]] by the legal costs of
defending its charge that South African Police
[[link removed]] General
[[link removed]] Lothar Neethling
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]] returning as editor and
Anneliese Burgess as co-editor. A new edition is published every
Friday on the Vrye Weekblad website._

* Donald Trump
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* South Africa
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* democracy
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* ANC
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* Racism
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* Sovereignty
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