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What is Trump’s new travel ban, and which countries are affected?
Nearly five months into his second term, Donald Trump has announced a new sweeping travel ban that could reshape the US’s borders more dramatically than any policy in modern memory. The restrictions, revealed through a presidential proclamation on Wednesday, would target citizens from more than a dozen countries – creating a three-tiered system of escalating barriers to entry.The proclamation represents one of the most ambitious attempts to reshape the US’s approach to global mobility in modern history and potentially affects millions of people coming to the United States for relocation, travel, work or school.What is a travel ban?A travel ban restricts or prohibits citizens of specific countries from entering the United States. These restrictions can range from complete visa suspensions to specific limitations on certain visa categories.Trump’s day one executive order required the state department to identify countries “for which vetting and screening information is so deficient as to warrant a partial or full suspension on the admission of nationals from those countries”.His travel ban proclamation referenced the previous executive order, as well as the recent attack by an Egyptian national in Boulder, Colorado, upon a group of people demonstrating for the release of Israeli hostages in Gaza.What is a presidential proclamation?A presidential proclamation is a decree that is often ceremonial or can have legal implications when it comes to national emergencies.Unlike an executive order, which is a directive to heads of agencies in the administration, the proclamation primarily signals a broad change in policy.Which countries are listed in the travel ban?The following countries were identified for total bans of any nationals seeking to travel to the US for immigrant or non-immigrant reasons:
Afghanistan
Myanmar
Chad
Republic of the Congo
Equatorial Guinea
Eritrea
Haiti
Iran
Libya
Somalia
Sudan
Yemen
He’s also partially restricting the travel of people from:Burundi
Cuba
Laos
Sierra Leone
Togo
Turkmenistan
Venezuela
Why were these countries chosen?The proclamation broadly cites national security issues for including the countries, but specifies a few different issues that reach the level of concern for the travel ban.For some countries, such as Afghanistan, Eritrea, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Libya and Venezuela, the proclamation claims that there is no reliable central authority for issuing passports or screening and vetting nationals traveling out of the country.For other countries, such as Myanmar, Chad, Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Burundi, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo and Turkmenistan, the proclamation cites a high rate of immigrants overstaying their visas in the US.Finally, there are several countries that are included because of terrorist activity or state- sponsored terrorism, including Iran, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia and Cuba.How does this travel ban differ from the one in 2017?The 2017 ban initially targeted seven predominantly Muslim countries before expanding to include North Korea and Venezuela. This new proclamation is broader and also makes the notable addition of Haiti.During his 2024 campaign for the presidency, Trump amplified false claims made by his running mate, JD Vance, that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were “eating the pets of the people that live there”. The proclamation falsely claims that “hundreds of thousands of illegal Haitian aliens flooded into the United States during the Biden administration” and this “influx harms American communities”. In fact, about 200,000 Haitians were granted temporary protected status, which gives legal residency permits to foreign nationals who are unable to return home safely due to conditions in their home countries.Also notable are the restrictions on Afghans, given that many of the Afghans approved to live in the US as refugees were forced to flee their home country as a result of working to support US troops there, before the full withdrawal of US forces in 2021. The agreement with the Taliban to withdraw US troops was negotiated by Trump during his first term.Last month, homeland security secretary Kristi Noem announced “the termination of temporary protected status for Afghanistan”, effective 20 May. More - in US Politics
Trump tariffs derailed by law firm that received money from his richest backers
Donald Trump’s tariff policy was derailed by a libertarian public interest law firm that has received money from some of his richest backers.The Liberty Justice Center filed a lawsuit against the US president’s “reciprocal” tariffs on behalf of five small businesses, which it said were harmed by the policy.The center, based in Austin, Texas, describes itself as a libertarian non-profit litigation firm “that seeks to protect economic liberty, private property rights, free speech, and other fundamental rights”.Previous backers of the firm include billionaires Robert Mercer and Richard Uihlein, who were also financial backers of Trump’s presidential campaigns.Mercer, a hedge fund manager, was a key backer of Breitbart News and Cambridge Analytica, pouring millions into both companies. He personally directed Cambridge Analytica to focus on the Leave campaign during the UK’s Brexit referendum in 2016 that led to the UK leaving the European Union.For its lawsuit against Trump’s tariffs, the Liberty Justice Center gathered five small businesses, including a wine company and a fish gear and apparel retailer, and argued that Trump overreached his executive authority and needed Congress’s approval to pass such broad tariffs.The other group who sued the Trump administration over its tariffs was a coalition of 12 Democratic state attorney generals who argued that Trump improperly used a trade law, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), when enacting his tariffs.In such a polarized time in US history, it may feel odd to see a decision celebrated by liberal and conservatives. But Trump’s tariffs have proven controversial to members of both parties, particularly after Wall Street seemed to be put on edge by the president’s trade war.The US stock market dipped down at least 5% after Trump announced the harshest of his tariff policies. Recovery was quick after Trump paused many of his harshest tariffs until the end of the summer.Stocks started to rally on Thursday morning after the panel’s ruling. The judges said that the law Trump cited when enacting his tariffs, the IEEPA does not “delegate an unbounded tariff authority onto the president”. The decision is on a temporary hold after the Trump administration appealed.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhile the ruling does not impact specific tariffs on industries such as aluminum and steel, it prevents the White House from carrying out broad retaliatory tariffs and its 10% baseline “reciprocal” tariff. The White House is appealing the ruling, which means the case could go up to the US supreme court, should the high court decide to take on the case.Members of both groups who sued the Trump administration celebrated the ruling. Jeffrey Schwab, senior counsel for the Liberty Justice Center, said in a statement that it “affirms that the president must act within the bounds of the law, and it protects American businesses and consumers from the destabilizing effects of volatile, unilaterally imposed tariffs”. Oregon’s Democratic attorney general, Dan Rayfield, who helped the states’ lawsuit, said that it “reaffirms that our laws matter”.In a statement, Victor Schwartz, the founder of VOS Selections, a wine company that was represented by the Liberty Justice Center in the suit, said that the ruling is a “win” for his business.“This is a win for my small business along with small businesses across America – and the world for that matter,” he said. “We are aware of the appeal already filed and we firmly believe in our lawsuit and will see it all the way through the United States Supreme Court.” More
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Trump’s foreign policy is not so unusual for the US – he just drops the facade of moral leadership
JD Vance is an Iraq war veteran and the US vice-president. On Friday, he declared the doctrine that underpinned Washington’s approach to international relations for a generation is now dead.“We had a long experiment in our foreign policy that traded national defence and the maintenance of our alliances for nation building and meddling in foreign countries’ affairs, even when those foreign countries had very little to do with core American interests,” Vance told Naval Academy graduates in Annapolis, Maryland.His boss Donald Trump’s recent trip to the Middle East signified an end to all that, Vance said: “What we’re seeing from President Trump is a generational shift in policy with profound implications for the job that each and every one of you will be asked to do.”US foreign policy has previously zigged and zagged from isolation to imperialism. Woodrow Wilson entered the first world war with the the goal of “making the world safe for democracy”. Washington retreated from the world again during the 1920s and 1930s only to fight the second world war and emerge as a military and economic superpower.Foreign policy during the cold war centered on countering the Soviet Union through alliances, military interventions and proxy wars. The 11 September 2001 attacks shifted focus to counterterrorism, leading to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq under George W Bush with justifications that included spreading democracy.Barack Obama emphasized diplomacy and reducing troop commitments, though drone strikes and counterterrorism operations persisted. Trump’s first term pushed economic nationalism, pressuring allies to pay their way. Joe Biden restored multilateralism, focusing on climate, alliances and countering China’s influence.As in many other political arenas, Trump’s second term is bolder and louder on the world stage.Trump and Vance have sought to portray the “America first” policy as a clean break from the recent past. Human rights, democracy, foreign aid and military intervention are out. Economic deals, regional stability and pragmatic self-interest are in.But former government officials interviewed by the Guardian paint a more nuanced picture, suggesting that Trump’s quid pro quo approach has more in common with his predecessors than it first appears. Where he does differ, they argue, is in his shameless abandonment of moral leadership and use of the US presidency for personal gain.On a recent four-day swing through Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, Trump was feted by autocratic rulers with a trio of lavish state visits where there was heavy emphasis on economic and security partnerships.Saudi Arabia pledged $600bn in investments in the US across industries such as energy, defence, technology and infrastructure, although how much of that will actually be new investment – or come to fruition – remains to be seen. A $142bn defence cooperation agreement was described by the White House as the biggest in US history.Qatar and the US inked agreements worth $1.2tn, including a $96bn purchase of Boeing jets. The UAE secured more than $200bn in commercial agreements and a deal to establish the biggest artificial intelligence campus outside the US.Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of the Atlantic magazine, said Trump had shown “the outlines of America’s newest foreign policy doctrine: extreme transactionalism”. He had prioritized quick deals over long-term stability, ideological principles or established alliances. But, Goldberg noted, the president had also advanced the cause of his family’s businesses.The president said he will accept a $400m luxury plane from Qatar and use it as Air Force One. Abu Dhabi is using a Trump family-aligned stablecoin for a $2bn investment in the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange. And the Trump Organization, run by the president’s two oldest sons, is developing major property projects including a high-rise tower in Jeddah, a luxury hotel in Dubai, and a golf course and villa complex in Qatar.Analysts say no US president has received overseas gifts on such a scale. Aaron David Miller, who served for two decades as a state department analyst, negotiator and adviser on Middle East issues for both Democratic and Republican administrations, said: “He gives transactionalism a bad name.“The level of self-dealing in this administration means the notion that the national interest is now seamlessly blended with Donald Trump’s personal interests and financial interests. The concept of an American national interest that transcends party politics and partisanship has gone the way of the dodo.”Ned Price, a former US state department spokesperson during the Biden administration, said: “I actually think calling this ‘transactional’ is far too charitable, because so much of this is predicated not on the national interest but on the president’s own personal interest, including his economic interests and the economic interests of his family and those around him.”Presidential trips to the Middle East usually feature at least some public calls for authoritarian governments to improve their human rights efforts. But not from Trump as he toured the marble and gilded palaces of Gulf rulers and deemed them “perfecto” and “very hard to buy” while barely mentioning the war in Gaza.In his remarks at a VIP business conference in Riyadh, the president went out of his way to distance himself from the actions of past administrations, the days when he said US officials would fly in “in beautiful planes, giving you lectures on how to live and how to govern your own affairs”.Trump said: “The gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called nation-builders, neocons or liberal non-profits like those who spent trillions and trillions of dollars failing to develop Kabul, Baghdad, so many other cities. Instead, the birth of a modern Middle East has been brought by the people of the region themselves, the people that are right here.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut Price challenges the notion that Trump’s aversion to interventionism represents revolution rather than evolution. “It is fair to say that presidents have successively been moving in that direction,” he said.“The sort of military adventurism that characterised the George W Bush presidency is not something that President Obama had an appetite for. It’s not something that President Biden had an appetite for. President Obama’s version of ‘Don’t do stupid shit’ has echoes of what President Trump said. Of course, as he often does, President Trump took it one step further.”Price added: “Most people who worked under President Biden or President Obama would tell you it doesn’t have to be either/or: you don’t have to be a nation builder or an isolationist. You can engage on the basis of interest and values at the same time and it’s about calibrating the mix rather than declaring the age of nation building is entirely over and from now on we’re not going to lecture, we’re just going to come in and be feted with your goods.”In his address in Riyadh, Trump made no reference to the 2018 killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul which, the CIA found, had been sanctioned by the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. The president’s willingness to turn a blind eye to human rights violations was condemned by Democrats.Ro Khanna, who serves on the House of Representatives’ armed services committee, said: “I was opposed to the Iraq war and I’m opposed to this idea that we can just go in and build nations. But I’m not opposed to the idea of human rights and international law.“To see an American president basically embrace cultural relativism was a rejection of any notion that American values about freedom and rule of law are not just our cultural constructs but are universal values.”Khanna added: “The past century of development in global governance structures has pointed us towards human rights and dignity. He wants to go back to a a world where we just have nation-states and that was the world that had wars and colonialism and conflict.”Trump is hardly the first president to court oil-rich nations in the Middle East and tread lightly on human rights issues. Nor is he the first to be accused of putting interests before values. The public was deceived to justify wars in Vietnam and Iraq. Democratically elected leaders have been ousted and brutal dictators propped up when it suited US policy goals.John Bolton, a former national security adviser to Trump, said: “Different presidencies say they have different priorities but I would be willing to go down the list and all of their record is mixed and somewhat hypocritical in terms of exactly what they do on the values side of things. Just take Biden as the most recent example. He started off by calling Saudi Arabia a pariah but by the end of it he was going to visit the crown prince as well.”In that sense, Trump’s lack of pretension to an ethical foreign policy might strike some as refreshingly honest. His supporters have long praised him for “telling it like it is” and refusing to indulge the moral platitudes of career politicians.Miller, the former state department official who is now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace thinktank in Washington, said: “He’s made explicit what is implicit in Republican and Democratic administrations. I’m not saying presidents don’t care about values; Joe Biden cared a lot about American values. But the reality is, when it comes time to make choices, where or what do we choose?”Miller added: “No administration I ever worked for made human rights or the promotion of democracy the centerpiece of our foreign policy. There are any number of reasons for that. But Donald Trump, it seems to me, is not even pretending there are values. He’s emptied the ethical and moral frame of American foreign policy.”Trump’s lifelong aversion to war is seen by many as a positive, including by some on the left. But it comes with an apparent desire to achieve significant and flashy diplomatic breakthroughs that might win him the Nobel peace prize. The president also displays an obvious comfort and preference for dealing with strongmen who flatter him, often siding with Russia’s Vladimir Putin against Ukraine.Miller commented: “Trump has no clear conception of the national interest. It’s subordinated to his grievances, his pet projects – tariffs – his political interests, his vanity, his financial interests. I worked for half a dozen secretaries of state of both political parties. That he is so far out of the norm with respect to foreign policy frankly is less of a concern to me than what’s happening here at home.” More
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Trump says he is hitting EU with 50% tariff as trade talks are ‘going nowhere’
Donald Trump has said he will impose a 50% tariff on all EU imports to the US from 1 June after claiming trade talks between the two trading blocs were “going nowhere”.In a surprise announcement, the US president posted on his Truth Social platform that his long-running battle to secure concessions from the EU had stalled.He accused the EU of taking advantage of the US on trade, saying: “Our discussions with them are going nowhere! Therefore I am recommending a straight 50% Tariff on the European Union, starting on June 1, 2025.”Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, Trump claimed the EU had “taken advantage” of the US and claimed the new tariffs would be imposed unless EU companies moved their operations to the US.“It’s time that we play the game the way I know how to play the game,” said Trump.Stock markets slumped in response to the news, the tech-heavy Nasdaq closed down 1% as Trump also signalled plans to impose tariffs on Apple, Samsung and other phone manufacturers. The broader S&P 500 lost 0.68%. The STOXX Europe 600 index fell by 1.7%. In London the FTSE 100 closed down 0.2% after initially dropping as much as 1.5%. Germany’s car makers were particularly hard hit, with BMW down 3.7%, Volkswagen off 2.6% and Mercedes-Benz down 4%.The US imposed a 20% “reciprocal” rate on most EU goods on 2 April, but halved that rate a week later until 8 July to allow time for talks. It has retained 25% import taxes on steel, aluminium and vehicle parts and is threatening similar action on pharmaceuticals, semiconductors and other goods.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“This is a major escalation of trade tensions,” said Holger Schmieding, the chief economist at Berenberg, on Friday. “With Trump you never know but this would be a major escalation. The EU would have to react and it is something that would really hurt the US and European economy.”EU negotiators have been locked in meetings with White House representatives since Trump’s so-called “liberation day” tariffs were first announced. Dozens of countries have been holding discussions to try to bring down their own levies before the 90-day pause elapses.The White House has relented on many of its most onerous tariffs, including lowering total tariffs on Chinese goods from 145% to 30% after what Trump declared were constructive talks with Beijing, which lowered its retaliatory border taxes from 125% to 10% in response.A week ago the US president appeared to acknowledge that Washington lacked the ability to negotiate deals with scores of countries at once, saying the US would instead send letters to some trading partners to unilaterally impose new tariff rates.Perceptions of an easing back on a hardline approach to trade brought a period of calm to stock markets, but Friday’s threat of a 50% levy on EU goods, plus a separate threat made the same day of 25% tariffs on iPhones made abroad, have brought an end to the peace.The EU presented a fresh trade proposal to the US on Thursday. The offer included phased tariff cuts on non-sensitive goods, plus cooperation on energy, AI and digital infrastructure. The bloc was readying about $108bn in retaliatory tariffs if talks failed.To sweeten the deal, EU officials were also willing to extend a 2020 tariff-free arrangement on US lobster imports, according to the Financial Times. But it appears to have proved insufficient to persuade the US president to sign a deal allowing only his 10% universal tariff to apply to the EU, as it does the UK. More
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Trump’s ambush of South Africa’s president shows how low the US has fallen | Justice Malala
Donald Trump should really try harder.When the US president unexpectedly and dramatically dimmed the lights inside the Oval Office on Wednesday and played a video clip of the alleged burial site of white victims of “genocide”, he meant to embarrass and humiliate his guest, Cyril Ramaphosa, the president of South Africa. It was his “gotcha!” moment after four months of relentless social media attacks, executive orders, boycotts, and threats of economic and diplomatic sanctions.As the video played, a smug Trump claimed it was proof of “white genocide” in South Africa and mumbled: “It’s a terrible sight, never seen anything like it.”It was all lies. The crosses in the video did not mark actual graves. It was a memorial made in September 2020 after two white people were killed on their farm a week earlier. The crosses were meant to represent farmers who had been killed over the years. The idea that it is “genocide” has been debunked so many times over the past 10 years that it is extraordinary that the US president is not ashamed to repeat it in public. The state department under Trump released a report in late 2020 pointing out that, according to official South African statistics for the 2018-2019 period, “farm killings represented only 0.2 percent of all killings in the country (47 of 21,022)”.So here we have a man who has the mighty US state department, the wily Central Intelligence Agency and numerous other resources at his beck and call to help him discern the truth, relying on a badly made propaganda video sourced from a racist, rightwing, anonymous South African X account. Instead of embarrassing Ramaphosa on Wednesday, Trump merely illustrated just how low the US has fallen.His poorly produced Oval Office show, taken with the 28 February attempt to humiliate Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, demonstrates that the country is now run by a man so steeped in discredited online conspiracy theories, so uncritical in his thinking, so poor in his grasp of global affairs, so careless in his exercise of power, that it is incredible that he is one of the most powerful figures in the world today. Such a figure’s power heralds instability and even danger for the world.The ambush of Ramaphosa is therefore not just spectacle. It is illumination. It underlines and emphasizes that Trump’s US is a fact-free, science-free, reality-television production lot whose leader daily defies court orders, alienates supporters of democracy, and tries to dismantle key practices such as the right to due process. It is an ugly place in which facts mean nothing and lies reign supreme.I was born under apartheid and lived under that heinous system until it was defeated in 1994. Those first 24 years were lived in Pretoria, in an impoverished village just an hour from Musk’s sumptuous family mansion in the suburb of Waterkloof. When I was teenager I walked the streets of Musk’s suburb, working as a “garden boy” or caddie, constantly harassed by police asking for my “pass book” – papers allowing me to be in the area designated “whites only”.I know apartheid. I grew up with it, breathed it and lived it every day. It is sickening to hear Trump compare the free, non-racist, democratic country that is South Africa today to the violent, murderous, hateful, system declared a “crime against humanity” by the United Nations in 1966.I know South Africa. I grew up in its brutal, cruel, divided past. I thrived in its hopeful democracy. I was one of the chroniclers of its political descent in the 2010s as its institutions came under assault from a leader with anti-democratic instincts. I visited my mother there last week. There is no genocide in South Africa. Yet, Trump recently posted on his Truth Social that he would not visit South Africa for the G20 summit when “white genocide” was happening there. Just more than 430,000 Americans visited South Africa in 2023, up 37.4% from 2022. I know of not a single one who can point to a genocide happening in the country.This is the president of the United States peddling lies.One is therefore not surprised by the numerous assaults on the American constitution by this administration. The kidnapping of student activists, the trampling upon of citizens’ constitutional rights, the assaults on institutions such as the judiciary, the shamelessness of politicians and their families and cronies enriching themselves – all this is typical of these kinds of corrupt regimes.What is going on in America? Kseniia Petrova, the Harvard Medical School researcher held for months in Louisiana for failing to declare samples of frog embryos she had carried from France at the request of her boss, told the New York Times: “I feel like something is happening generally in America … Something bad is happening. I don’t think everybody understands.”Petrova, who fled Putin’s murderous regime as darkness fell over Russia following the invasion of Ukraine, understands the profound cloud hanging over the US. Those of us who grew up in regimes such as apartheid understand this ominous period.Trump’s actions are scary enough. It is, however, the silence of the US as assaults on American constitutional principles unfold that is most disturbing.This is not a lament for South Africa and how badly it is being treated by the US. It is a lament for myself, for those of us who grew up under systems such as apartheid believing that the US would uphold the rule of law, stand up for truth and speak up for these principles, and for a better world. A monarchical Trump, defying the supreme court and abandoning fact-based decision-making, imperils it all. With every student bundled by masked men into a van, this vaunted republic becomes smaller, lesser. It becomes Putin’s Russia, it becomes something akin to the way I lived under apartheid – a place where a contrarian thought led to detention without trial, to disappearance and for many, to death.There was a telling moment in Wednesday’s interaction when Trump revealed himself. It was a moment which reminded one that corruption, or the smell of it, now sits in the White House. Trump had just referred to a reporter as a “jerk” and an “idiot” because he had confronted him about why he was accepting the “gift” of a jet from Qatar to use as Air Force One.“Why did a country give an airplane to the United States air force? So they could help us out, because we need an Air Force One,” Trump fumed.Ramaphosa quipped: “I’m sorry I don’t have a plane to give you.”Trump didn’t detect the disdain in Ramaphosa’s voice and doubled down on the corruption inherent in accepting such a gift.“I wish you did. I would take it. If your country offered the United States air force a plane, I would take it,” Trump said.And there was the emperor, naked: an unethical leader who worships the dollar and has no concept of how corrupt his actions look to the rest of the world. This is what Wednesday was all about: an America led by a man susceptible to lies and lacking in a moral centre.Wednesday was not about South Africa. It was all about America today.
Justice Malala is a political commentator and author of The Plot To Save South Africa: The Week Mandela Averted Civil War and Forged a New Nation More
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Trump’s evidence of South Africa ‘white genocide’ contains images from Democratic Republic of Congo
The evidence of supposed mass killings of white South Africans presented by Donald Trump in a tense White House meeting on Wednesday were in some cases images from the Democratic Republic of Congo, while footage shown during the meeting was falsely portrayed as depicting “burial sites”.“These are all white farmers that are being buried,” said Trump, holding up a print-out of an article accompanied by a picture during the contentious Oval Office meeting with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa.The picture accompanying the article was in fact a screengrab of a video published by Reuters on 3 February and subsequently verified by the news agency’s fact check team, showing humanitarian workers lifting body bags in the Congolese city of Goma. The image was pulled from Reuters footage shot after deadly battles with Rwanda-backed M23 rebels.The White House did not respond to a Reuters request for comment.At another point in the meeting, Trump ambushed Ramaphosa by playing a video that he claimed proved genocide is being committed against white people in South Africa. Within it was footage that Trump claimed showed the graves of more than a thousand white farmers, marked by white crosses.The footage – taken at a highway connecting the small towns of Newcastle and Normandein in South Africa – in fact showed a memorial site, and not graves.Rob Hoatson, who set up the memorial to capture public attention, told the BBC it was not a burial site.“It was a memorial. It was not a permanent memorial that was erected. It was a temporary memorial,” he said. The memorial was setup in the aftermath of a murder of two Afrikaner farmers in the local community.The video played by Trump on Wednesday contained several falsehoods and inaccuracies, but was intended to back the president’s offer of “refuge” to persecuted white farmers, which has angered the South African government which disputes the allegations. The White House claimed it showed evidence of genocide of white farmers in South Africa. This conspiracy theory, which has circulated among the far-right for years, is based on false claims.The video prominently featured Julius Malema, a firebrand politician known for his radical rhetoric. He was seen in several clips wearing the red beret of his populist, Marxist-inspired Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) party and chanting calls to “cut the throat of whiteness” as well as a controversial anti-apartheid song “Kill the Boer, kill the farmer”.Trump falsely said he was a government official, insinuating his inflammatory slogans reflected an official policy against South Africa’s white minority.Malema is an opposition politician who gained prominence advocating radical reforms including land redistribution and nationalising key economic sectors.The party only came fourth in last year’s elections, with 9.5% of the vote. During the Oval Office meeting, Ramaphosa and his delegation distanced themselves from Malema’s rhetoric.Agriculture minister John Steenhuisen, a member of the centre-right Democratic Alliance, told Trump he joined Ramaphosa’s multiparty coalition “precisely to keep these people out of power”.Ramaphosa visited Washington this week to try to mend ties with the United States after persistent criticism from Trump in recent months over South Africa’s land laws, foreign policy, and alleged bad treatment of its white minority, which South Africa denies.With Reuters and Agence France-Presse More
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The Guardian view on the US and South Africa: Trump looks to his base and partners look elsewhere | Editorial
The most telling moment of Donald Trump’s meeting with Cyril Ramaphosa was not the cynical screening of footage promoting false claims of “white genocide” in South Africa. It was when a reporter asked the US president what he wanted his counterpart to do about it. Mr Trump replied: “I don’t know.”Leaders enter the Oval Office uneasily, especially since the kicking administered to Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The South African president came armed with gratitude, two golf stars, a billionaire and compliments on the decor – and kept a cool head and a straight face as he was ambushed. Mr Ramaphosa later described it as “robust engagement”. But, in truth, it was a clash of two worlds rather than an interaction.On one side sat a political heavyweight who calmly asserted the facts; on the other, Mr Trump, espousing wild and inflammatory myths. One side wanted to do bilateral business; the other to pander to the grievances of his domestic base, many of whom doubtless relished the public scolding of an anti-apartheid veteran. No solution was proffered to the imaginary problem.The ruling African National Congress (ANC) has fallen far short in too many regards. Violent crime is rife. But the administration’s accusations invert reality. White South Africans are 7% of the population but still own 72% of the land. Experts say that it is poor black people, not wealthier whites, who are disproportionately likely to be victims of violence. Yet as the scholar Nicky Falkof has written, white South Africans have become a “cautionary tale for the White far right [internationally] … central to the landscape and language of White supremacy”. Look where DEI gets you.Mr Trump aired complaints about the “large-scale killing” of white farmers in his first term, amplifying conspiracy theories that originated in far-right forums. Since then, he has grown closer to the South African-born Elon Musk, who has accused politicians there of “promoting white genocide”. The US has now cut aid to South Africa, accusing the government of “unjust racial discrimination” and attacking its genocide case against Israel at the international court of justice. Washington has expelled the South African ambassador and given white Afrikaners asylum even as it turns away those fleeing wars.Mr Trump’s divisive conspiracy theories and failed attempt to humiliate Mr Ramaphosa appear, ironically, to be fostering unity on foreign affairs within South African politics, where the ANC and its (white-led) coalition partner, the Democratic Alliance, have had very different histories and priorities. The US still accounts for a tenth of the country’s trade. South Africa must shore up its auto sector and agriculture, given its sky-high unemployment rate. But like other governments, Pretoria is salvaging what it can in US relations now, while looking ahead to diversifying its ties. Few expect Washington to renew duty-free trade arrangements for African states this autumn.Warming relations with other western countries is one option. But increasing closeness to China, already South Africa’s top trading partner, looks like an inevitability. Members of the Brics grouping see an opportunity to strengthen ties, though South Africa is discovering that expansion does not always mean greater influence for its dominant players. Mr Trump is looking for kudos, free planes and red meat to throw to his base. Washington’s partners are increasingly looking elsewhere. It’s in US interests to show them respect and nurture longstanding relationships.
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