SA exporters, especially those who make use of the African Growth & Opportunity Act (Agoa), should be taking every possible step to minimise their exposure to the American market if they are not already doing so. Any institution or organisation that depends on funding over which the US government has any say should likewise be seeking alternatives.
Donald Trump’s regime — let’s call it what it is — is implacably hostile to the government formed on the basis of the preferences South Africans freely expressed at the polls last year. He wants to hurt the country. He is treating SA the way he treated the baby he was caught pelting with rocks when he was five.
In nominating Brent Bozell, father of the pardoned January 6 putschist of the same name, as his Pretoria Ribbentrop, Trump has confirmed he has little interest in building bridges.
Bozell is a common or garden variety right-wing, Israel-can-do-no-wrong media-bashing place-seeker who knows exactly how awful Trump is but who, like so many of the Republican Party’s hollow men, has nonetheless em-poodled himself and kissed the ring.
He maintains Trump was cheated in 2020, so he is either craven or delusional, neither of which qualities compel admiration, let alone trust. How can one take such a person seriously? His late uncle, William F Buckley, a conservative of real principle and intellectual heft, would be sickened by the sycophancy.
The ANC has governed neither well nor with great integrity, but that does not excuse its domestic critics for whining their way to the petticoats of a wannabe dictator who has repeatedly declared that people of colour are poisoning his nation’s blood (when not eating its pets) and is now coveting the territory of a supposed ally as if it were the Sudetenland. I’m sorry. The parallels are unavoidable.
No less regrettable, of course, are the redshirted choruses of “Kill the Boer!”. They look like a deliberate attempt to sharpen Trump’s determination to punish the people of SA for their political choices. Julius Malema and Trump are in dialectical cahoots.
The ANC negotiated an end to apartheid with some pretty rough customers. Perhaps on the strength of that, President Cyril Ramaphosa hopes to oil the waters. Good luck. PW Botha, the Groot Krokodil, was a pillar of honesty, kindness and rationality next to Trump.
Of course, even if Kamala Harris had won last November, Pretoria would still have had some exquisite tap dancing to do to preserve the benefits it enjoys under Agoa. Charging Israel with genocide before the International Court of Justice and playing war games with Russia and China were moves not calculated to endear SA to either side of the aisle on Capitol Hill. But the argument for SA’s continued inclusion in Agoa — for the continent’s sake — would still have been winnable.
That is no longer the case. Lobbyists for Agoa’s renewal before it expires in September are not risking their already slender chances by sticking up for SA’s continued inclusion. Resigned to Trump’s prejudices, they are tossing SA overboard in hopes of keeping the boat afloat for everyone else.
Trump’s perverse crush on Vladimir Putin might help get SA forgiven for one of its sins at least: its none-too-credible claim of nonalignment regarding Putin’s attempt to recover Ukraine for the Russian Empire. Maybe Ramaphosa can persuade the Czar to put in a word. My guess is that it won’t do much good. Geopolitics are not the primary reason Trump has it in for SA.
Do not confuse Trump’s association over the years with individual black celebrities such as Mike Tyson, Don King and Tiger Woods with how he views “the blacks” — his antediluvian usage — collectively.
People of good faith can differ over the extent to which discrimination and its legacies can be healed by more discrimination — count me as a sceptic — but Trump’s scorched-earth, shoot-first assault on “diversity, equity and inclusion” is animated by old, familiar demons. It reeks of rage and vile reflexive assumptions about genes, industriousness, honesty and cognitive ability.
Trump means to revisit the age of Cecil Rhodes and King Leopold, in which great powers carved up the planet between them. His 2025 trade policy agenda dreams that the US will once more be a “production economy”, humming with new mills in which well-paid workers convert raw inputs into finished goods behind protective tariffs and a cheap dollar.
Some of those inputs will have to come from Africa in the form of minerals. Trump will seek ways of extorting access through a combination of menaces and bribes, the latter made easier by his decision not to enforce the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
• Barber is a freelance journalist based in Washington.
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