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white supremacy
Will Black Trump Supporters Speak Out Against His Racist and Authoritarian Government?
The silence of Black MAGA supporters in the face of Trump and Vance’s bigotry during the campaign has carried over to the second Trump era.
Mar 30, 2025
During the 2024 election campaign, candidate Donald Trump’s most controversial rally occurred at New York’s Madison Square Garden. A comedian on the program referred to the island of Puerto Rico—and by implication Puerto Ricans—as garbage. He and the Trump campaign were rightfully pilloried and called out for his disgusting bigotry.
Little notice was given, however, to another noxious racist moment at the same event. On Trump’s playlist for the rally was the Confederate and white nationalist anthem “Dixie.” Notably, that song was played as Trump loyalist and harsh defender Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) was coming on stage. Donalds is African American and perhaps Trump’s most visible Black sycophant. While Black social media and journalists crucified Trump and Donalds over the incident, for Black MAGA supporters, the episode was simply put in the memory hole.
They were muted as well when Trump and vice-presidential candidate JD Vance spread racist falsehoods about Haitians supposedly eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio. They seemed to be the only people in the country who didn’t hear what everyone else had heard—a fabrication of stunning proportions.
Trump and MAGA’s White Nationalist Rampage
The silence of Black MAGA supporters in the face of Trump and Vance’s bigotry during the campaign has carried over to the second Trump era. Now that he’s president again, their voices are being quelled as his white-power, autocratic government takes shape.
The president has spent almost every day of his second term in office so far raging against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI); issuing executive orders of a white nationalist flavor; attacking a federal workforce that’s disproportionately people of color; and making it clear that rolling back civil rights and Black social and education advances is one of his top priorities. Nearly every move of his has involved nods to racist themes and aims. That includes his effort to defy the Constitution and try to eliminate birthright citizenship, his mass firings and funding freezes while he vanishes DEI programs across the federal government, his plan to deport millions of undocumented immigrants (of color), and even his take on the wildfires in Los Angeles and the Washington area airplane-helicopter disaster.
Trump thinks of his racialized and racist perspective on such events as “common sense.” Consider that a shield for his bias against and antipathy to science and evidence, as well as his visceral inability to see Black people and other people of color in any position of authority and expertise outside of sports and entertainment.
Racism should really be considered the central characteristic of Trump 2.0.
His vitriol against the world’s most marginalized and poor has led him to try to completely shut the door on illegal (and even legal) immigration—with a single exception. Recently, he spread his arms and opened America’s visa gates to Afrikaners, the whites whom he (along with Elon Musk) has determined are an oppressed minority in South Africa. Falsely claiming that their lands have been seized by the South African government and that they face genocide, in an executive order he called them “victims of unjust racial discrimination.” He also wrote on social media, “Any Farmer (with family!) from South Africa, seeking to flee that country for reasons of safety, will be invited into the United States of America with a rapid pathway to Citizenship.” Perhaps it’s a coincidence that Elon Musk, Trump’s co-president, who traffics in racist themes about race and intelligence online, is South African apartheid-era born.
It must be strongly emphasized that Trump’s executive order and his multiple social posts on the subject are not only blatant lies but align with the work of South African and American white supremacists who have falsely charged that a “genocide” is indeed occurring there. And speaking of white supremacists, add to that list his decision to release the white supremacists and neo-Nazis who were among the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 (with, of course, Trump’s blessing and encouragement). With the stroke of a pen, he absolved violent and white nationalist criminals who had carried signs supporting the Holocaust and yelled racist epithets at Black Capitol police officers.
His war against Black agency has been happily joined by his MAGA allies in Congress. Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.), for example, threatened to cut off millions of dollars in aid to the District of Columbia unless Mayor Muriel Bowser removed street art that read “Black Lives Matter” and renamed the area adjacent to it (previously known as Black Lives Matter Plaza) Liberty Plaza. Clyde claimed that the art was a “divisive slogan.” It went unmentioned that, if he genuinely wanted to get rid of divisive racial symbols, he could start at home. According to the Equal Justice Institute, Clyde’s state of Georgia is host to “more than 160 monuments honoring the Confederacy.”
Silence Is Not Golden
All of this is part of Trump’s lawless and corrupt war on democracy and the strategic divisiveness that is both his brand and his currency. The convicted-felon-in-chief’s usurpation of power has been as shameless as it is brazen, as he attempts to impose a government that could be characterized as racially authoritarian. In fact, racism should really be considered the central characteristic of Trump 2.0.
And what has been the response of Black Republican members of Congress to such behavior? Where is the pushback from his (once upon a time) only Black cabinet member, former Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Ben Carson? Has there been any reaction from Snoop Dogg, Nelly, or other pro-Trump rappers who claim affinity with the Black grassroots? The answer, of course, is not a peep. Most have run for cover, pretending that Trump is not who he has always been: a serial racist attempting to reshape the nation into a far-right, anti-democratic, white, Christian nationalist stronghold.
Some of his prominent Black acolytes have, in fact, gone on the record opposing “equity” and DEI in general. Byron Donalds, for example, says he has issues with “equity” because it puts a person’s demographic ahead of his “actual qualifications.” It should be noted that, during the 2024 campaign, Donalds, whom Trump was then supposedly considering as a vice-presidential candidate, stated that the Jim Crow segregation era hadn’t actually been so bad because “the Black family was together” and “Black people voted conservatively.”
But qualifications or even competency are not really the issue. As New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie wrote, “Donald Trump does not care about merit.” It couldn’t be plainer or simpler than that. In late February, with the encouragement and full support of Department of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Trump fired Gen. CQ Brown Jr. from his position as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. There is little doubt that Trump got rid of him because he was Black and had been outspoken on issues of race and inclusion. Hegseth accused him of having a “woke agenda.” Brown, a four-star general, is to be replaced by Dan Caine, who, you undoubtedly won’t be shocked to learn, is white and a three-star general.
On the rare occasions when Black MAGA denizens have actually addressed the president’s pathological drive to resegregate the country, it has been to protect him and his policies from criticism. The Black Conservative Federation (BCF), for example, issued a statement, riven with White House talking points, defending Trump’s (probably illegal) federal funding freeze, even as it was being condemned broadly by so many, including some of his Republican allies. Echoing Trump, it stated without evidence that the freeze would do no harm to programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Medicare, and Social Security while ignoring the massive negative impact it was going to have on Head Start, Medicaid, and other programs. To the BCF’s embarrassment, the president was forced to rescind the order 48 hours after it was issued.
Their one-sided loyalty to Trump knows no bounds. Last year, BCF created and presented him with the “Champion of Black America” award at their gala. And that was no joke. He gleefully accepted the award while making awkward racial remarks to the mostly white crowd. The BCF also held an inauguration event for him with tickets ranging in price from $5,000 to $100,000 dollars, which, according to the group, was soon sold out.
The BCF declared on its Facebook page that it is proud to celebrate Black History Month (BHM) and encourages everyone to “celebrate the rich tapestry of contributions made by African Americans throughout history.” Yet there was not one word addressing the cancellation of BHM events at numerous departments across the federal government following the orders of the nation’s white-supremacist-in-chief to quash DEI and any programs that seemed related to it. The Defense Department issued a memo declaring “identity months dead,” while the Transportation Department gleefully announced that it “will no longer participate in celebrations based on immutable traits or any other identity-based observances.”
Far-right political scientist and Trump booster Carol Swain, best known for the Islamophobic rant that forced her to leave her tenured position at Vanderbilt University, wrote a mumble-jumble article hailing his attack on DEI. Although like some other Black conservatives she benefited from affirmative action, she now wants to pretend that DEI is an evil distortion of civil rights. She advocates for the neutral language of “nondiscrimination,” “equal opportunity,” and “integration,” suggesting that they are acceptable conservative values unlike “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion.” She seems pathetically unaware that Trump has no love for civil rights, voting rights, or affirmative action.
Out of Touch with the Black Majority
It must be noted that Black MAGA is overwhelmingly out of sync with the Black community in general. In large numbers, African Americans support DEI, affirmative action, and other hard-won programs that provide opportunities historically denied thanks to racial prejudice and discrimination. Black opposition to Trump is not just due to the racist slander and bile he now aims at people of color, but also to a well-documented history of bigotry. His long record of housing discrimination and advocacy for voting suppression flies in the face of the Fair Housing Act and the Voting Rights Act of the 1960s, signature victories for the civil rights and Black power movements that Trump and his Black supporters now disparage.
Trump garnered only single-digit support from Blacks in his 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns. Despite an effort to scam Black voters with Trump-created Black groups and false claims of surging Black support, he won only 6% of the Black vote in 2016 and 8% in 2020.
Unless there is organized and mobilized political resistance, President Trump will continue to throw racist tantrums and engage in dangerous, even potentially disastrous, racist policies for the next three years and 10 months while Republicans, including Black MAGA types, stand by in a distinctly cowardly fashion.
In the 2024 election, Trump won between 13% and 16% of the Black vote. This was a rise from, but not a great leap above, that 8% (documented by the Pew Research Center) in his 2020 loss to former President Joe Biden.
More recent data shows Trump rapidly losing whatever Black support he had. A YouGov and the Economist poll in February found that only 24% of Black Americans approved of Trump’s job performance so far, while about 69% disapproved. In that poll, white approval was 57% and Hispanic approval 40%.
Denied a Role in Trump’s New Administration
In the new Trump administration, Black Republicans have essentially no perch from which to speak out (even if they wanted to). Trump has one African American in his cabinet, HUD Secretary Scott Turner, as was true with Ben Carson in his first term. Both were ghettoized at HUD. And Turner has recently bent the knee and essentially surrendered HUD to Elon Musk’s rampaging “Department” of Government Efficiency. Turner, in fact, even formed a DOGE Task Force that will certainly lead to staff cuts at HUD (but no guarantee whatsoever of any savings). In the meantime, HUD canceled $4 million in DEI contracts.
Trump also nominated former football star and disastrous Senate candidate Herschel Walker to be ambassador to the Bahamas. Walker, who had to be chaperoned to interviews during his 2020 Senate campaign by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and others due to his striking inability to make it through an interview without numerous gaffes, has no qualifications whatsoever to be an ambassador.
While some of Trump’s Black supporters have grumbled privately about being ostracized and marginalized, they dare not speak out publicly or demonstrate anything less than 100% fealty. And they are hardly the only Blacks suffering job losses because of Trump.
His goal to get rid of tens of thousands of federal workers will have an immediate impact on the economic and social health of the Black community. After all, African Americans constitute a disproportionate number of federal workers, a key area of employment that helped build the Black middle class. While African Americans constitute about 12.5% of the population, they are about 19% of the federal workforce. And being central to DEI, they are essentially guaranteed to be first on the chopping black.
Yet Black MAGA gathered for a Trump-led Black History Month celebration at the White House, clearly unphased by the irony of such a grim Saturday Night Live-style moment. Like his previous BHM events, it was, of course, mostly about Trump. Some of his favorite old and new Black sycophants were there, including far-right Christian activist and niece of Martin Luther King, Jr., Alveda King; golfer Tiger Woods (rumored to be dating Trump’s ex-daughter-in-law); HUD Secretary Scott Turner; Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.); and Trump youth organizer C.J. Pearson.
In an interview, Pearson stated that “President Trump’s anti-DEI policies aren’t promoting racism but what they are doing is manifesting the dream of the great Martin Luther King Jr.: a nation where one isn’t judged by the color of their skin but instead by the content of their character.” Pearson was making this claim while, across the federal government, departments and agencies were canceling Black History Month celebrations and “identity” events.
As the crowd drank wine and ate snacks, neither Trump nor any of the attendees mentioned the elephant in the room: the president’s savage anti-DEI campaign.
Unless there is organized and mobilized political resistance, President Trump will continue to throw racist tantrums and engage in dangerous, even potentially disastrous, racist policies for the next three years and 10 months while Republicans, including Black MAGA types, stand by in a distinctly cowardly fashion. And count on one thing, as is likely to be true of so many other aspects of Donald Trump’s policies: Their capitulation will not age well.
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Donald Trump, The Treasonous Confederate Army's Last General
Just as dictatorial rule in the antebellum South and the post-Reconstruction decades of Jim Crow segregation was established and reinforced by structural racism, Trump also employs white supremacy to pursue unchecked power.
Mar 26, 2025
It has been 160 years since the last shots were fired in the deadliest war in U.S. history, in which up to 750,000 Americans died in a rebellion by Southern states to preserve slavery. Devotees of the Confederacy have never surrendered the Lost Cause mythology, and it’s increasingly apparent Donald Trump and his administration are among them.
The Confederacy went to war to defend the antebellum economic, social, and cultural system, an autocratic fiefdom of slave states run by an oligarchal plantation class enriched by a virulent racialized foundation. “Into the hands of the slaveholders the political power of the South was concentrated by their social prestige, (and) property ownership” that created their wealth through chattel slavery and the lie of Black inferiority, wrote W.E.B. DuBois in his 1935 opus Black Reconstruction in America.
The world that marries white supremacy with authoritarian rule that inspires those who wave Confederate flags and venerate Confederate monuments is replicated in Trump’s aspirations. It filtered through Trump’s first term, most notoriously in his embrace of Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville, Virginia to oppose removal of a Robert E. Lee statue as “some very fine people.” But it is fully unleashed in Trump 2.0.
Just as dictatorial rule in the antebellum South and the post-Reconstruction decades of Jim Crow segregation was established and reinforced by structural racism, Trump also employs white supremacy to pursue unchecked power, this time under a guise to root out diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs.
The revisionist portrayal of the Civil War slipped out from the Pentagon under Trump loyalist Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Arlington National Cemetery, the Washington Post reported, “scrubbed information about prominent Black, Hispanic and female service members and topics such as the Civil War from its website,” part of a “broader effort across the Defense Department to remove all references to (DEI) from its online presence.” DEI “is dead at the Defense Department. Discriminatory Equity Ideology is a form of Woke cultural Marxism that has no place in our military,” intoned a Pentagon spokesperson.
Biographies of prominent Black, Latino, and women service members were suddenly erased, from Sgt. William Carney, the first Black American to earn a Medal of Honor during the Civil War, to prominent heroes of later wars. Though public outrage forced restoring recognition of the service of Jackie Robinson, World War II Tuskegee Airmen, a decorated Japanese American unit while Americans of Japanese descent were interned, and the famous Navajo Code Talkers, most of the erasure remains.
Along with other purges, Hegseth fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, veteran Black Army leader Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown and replaced him with a less qualified white man after Brown recorded a four-minute video about conversations with his son following the police murder of George Floyd. That act exposed the fabrication of “merit” behind the anti-DEI crusade while also reimposing a portrait of white men as the presumptive standard of qualification.
“The full throttled attack on Black leadership, dismantling of civil rights protections, imposition of unjust anti-DEI regulations, and unprecedented historical erasure across the Department of Defense is a clear sign of a new Jim Crow being propagated by our Commander in Chief,” said Richard Brookshire, co-CEO of the Black Veterans Project.
The DEI crusade
Within hours of his inauguration, Trump signed executive orders and directives to eradicate “all DEI related offices and positions; equity action plans, actions, initiatives or programs; equity-related grants or contracts; and DEI performance requirements for employees, contractors, or grantees.”
Next Trump overturned President Johnson’s 1965 executive order banning discrimination by federal contractors and subcontractors. "These provisions that required federal contractors to adhere to and comply with federal civil rights laws and to maintain integrated rather than segregated workplaces,” noted constitutional law professor Melissa Murray, “were all part of the federal government's efforts to facilitate the settlement that led to integration in the 1950s and 1960s.”
A systematic purge of employees in federal agencies led by Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency( DOGE) followed. Not coincidentally, it had a disproportionate impact on Black federal workers, as well as women and LGBTQ employees. Trump also, without evidence, blamed DEI hires for the disastrous National Airport plane crash.
Concurrently, Trump targeted legally mandated equal employment opportunity and civil rights offices that empower federal workers to file complaints and enforce antidiscrimination laws, through multiple federal agencies. Cuts also harm public health, including programs to reduce racial and gender disparities in maternal and infant health, cancer, and chronic disease.
A number of private employers have followed suit, including Amazon, Meta, Google, Walmart, Target, Goldman Sachs, Pepsi and McDonalds, ending programs intended to expand diversity within their own workforces. “Five years ago, (many) were posting about Black Lives Matter,” says Theodore Johnson, a senior adviser at the New America think tank. Now these companies are “following government cues,” getting rid of race-conscious policies as they scramble to comply with the administration’s directions.
Education has been a major assault with mandates that K-12 schools as well as colleges and universities end DEI programs, alleging they are “anti-American, subversive, harmful, and false ideologies,” note professors Philip Klinkner and Rogers Smith. The goal of redefining education also seeks to indoctrinate a new generation of young people in conservative ideology. Private colleges were not immune, especially as Trump slashed Biden-era initiatives and federal funds to support Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), tribal colleges, and Hispanic institutions, while forcing others, like Columbia University, to silence and criminalize dissent.
Trump has made DEI the cudgel for efforts to erase post-Civil War Reconstruction and subsequent New Deal and Civil Rights movement reforms, while seeking to reimpose Jim Crow era segregation and one-party rule. All while evading legal statues, court orders, and shaking down media and law firms deemed disloyal, punctuating the agenda of a monarchial coup in progress.
Trump’s executive order bidding to overturn the 14th Amendment right of birthright citizenship symbolizes this push. It represents a full-throated attack on what radio host Clay Cane calls “a “bedrock principle of American democracy. To dismantle it is to open the door to the erosion of all rights gained through the blood, sweat, and tears of those who came before us.”
In his seminal work The Second Founding on the Reconstruction amendments and laws, historian Eric Foner argues they “not only put abolition, equal rights, and black male suffrage into the Constitution, but in its provisions for national enforcement made the federal government for the first time what [abolitionist Sen. Charles] Sumner called ‘the custodian of freedom’.”
A key phrase of the birthright citizenship clause, Foner emphasizes, says no state shall “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws… for the first time (it) elevates equality to a constitutional right.” The Equal Protection Clause became the vehicle “for radically expanding the rights” for all “persons” not just citizens.
Aided by the 15th Amendment’s right to vote for Black men, the reforms “inspired an outburst of political organization” with “direct action to confront long standing discrimination” and created new state constitutions creating “the region’s first state-funded systems of free public education,” and other democratic reforms that produced “a fundamental shift of power in the South and a radical departure in American government.”
Overall, the second founding, observes Foner, “forged a new constitutional relationship between individual Americans and the national state and were crucial in creating the world’s first biracial democracy.”
That’s what is at stake today. Public protests have forced some setbacks for the Trump coup. It will be up to all of us to escalate those efforts with the same focus of street actions, mass protests, and a united front that led to prior eras of expanded rights in order to protect a genuine democracy.
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South African Diplomat Called a 'Disgrace' by Marco Rubio, Returns Home a Hero
The Trump administration's ouster of South Africa's Ambassador to the U.S. Ebrahim Rasool was certainly meant to warn other countries about the consequences of challenging the United States—but it may well backfire.
Mar 24, 2025
On March 14, Secretary of State Marco Rubio publicly berated South Africa’s Ambassador to the U.S. Ebrahim Rasool in a most undiplomatic tweet, writing: “South Africa's Ambassador to the United States is no longer welcome in our great country. Ebrahim Rasool is a race-baiting politician who hates America and hates @POTUS. We have nothing to discuss with him and so he is considered PERSONA NON GRATA.” On Sunday, March 23, the South African ambassador returned home to a hero’s welcome.
The United States lost a seasoned South African representative who had previously served as ambassador under President Obama, was a member of South Africa’s National Assembly, and was active (and imprisoned) during his country’s anti-apartheid struggle. And ginning up the conflict with a country that has such tremendous international standing may prove to be a bad move for President Trump.
Trump administration was incensed by remarks the ambassador had made earlier that week when speaking, via video, at a South Africa conference. He commented on the MAGA movement, saying that it is driven by white supremacy and is a response to the growing demographic diversity in the United States. The ambassador also expressed concern about the movement’s global reach, including support from Elon Musk, who was born in South Africa and has connections with extreme right movements overseas. The ambassador called his nation, South Africa, “the historical antidote to supremacism.”
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said the decision to expel Rasool was “regrettable” and that “South Africa remains committed to building a mutually beneficial relationship with the United States.”
Ambassador Rasool, who says he has no regrets, was greeted by a massive crowd as he landed in Cape Town.
Rasool’s expulsion is only the latest manifestation of U.S. displeasure with South Africa. On March 17, State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce listed a litany of issues the U.S. has with South Africa, including its “unjust land appropriations law”; its growing relationship with Russia and Iran; and the fact that it accused Israel of genocide in the International Court of Justice. Bruce denounced the ambassador’s lack of decorum, which she called obscene, and painted South Africa as a country whose policies make the United States and the entire world less safe.
This is in stark contrast to the view of South Africa from the Global South, where the African nation’s foreign policy is often seen as exemplary. Since the end of apartheid in 1994, the ruling African National Congress (ANC) has embraced a non-aligned foreign policy and has tried to resist pressure from Western countries. South Africa has also continued to show appreciation for nations such as Russia, Cuba and Iran that supported its anti-apartheid struggle.
South Africa’s non-aligned stance became a bone of contention with the Biden administration after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The United States pushed the world community to condemn Russia, but South Africa, along with many African nations, refused to take sides. South Africa has long had warm relations with Russia, dating back to the days when the Soviet Union trained and supported many of the ANC freedom fighters. Instead of condemning Russia, South Africa led a group of six African nations to advocate for negotiations to end the Russia/Ukraine conflict.
But it was Israel’s war on Gaza that placed the United States and South Africa on a collision course. Far from supporting the U.S. ally, Israel, South Africa accused Israel of committing genocide against the Palestinians at the International Court of Justice. The Biden administration denounced the case as “meritless, counterproductive, and completely without any basis in fact whatsoever,” but the case triggered an avalanche of global support for South Africa’s principled stand. Dr. Haidar Eid, a Palestinian academic from Gaza, reflected world opinion when he said said, “By bravely standing up for what is right and taking Israel to the ICJ, South Africa showed us that another world is possible: a world where no state is above the law, most heinous crimes like genocide and apartheid are never accepted and the peoples of the world stand together shoulder to shoulder against injustice. Thank You, South Africa.”
When President Trump regained the White House, he not only condemned South Africa for its ICJ case against Israel, but he became embroiled in a policy totally internal to the African nation. Most likely egged on by Elon Musk, Trump denounced South Africa’s Expropriation Act of 2025, which established a program to expropriate unused agricultural land that White owners refused to sell to Black purchasers. White South Africans (Afrikaners) controlled the oppressive apartheid government until it was overthrown in 1994, and Afrikaners continue to own the vast majority of the wealth (the typical Black household owns 5 per cent of the wealth held by the typical White household). But Trump called the White population “racially disfavored landowners” and shockingly, not only punished South Africa by cutting off U.S. aid, but also promoted “the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination.” While shutting U.S. doors to immigrants of color from around the world, Trump laid out the red carpet for the white Africaners. Little wonder Ambassador Rasool was moved to call the Trump administration a leader in white supremacy.
Trump’s decision to cut aid to South Africa coincides with the administration’s gutting of US AID, which has had a disastrous effect on South Africans suffering from HIV/AIDS. The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) was a U.S. program launched in 2003 by President Bush to provide life-saving HIV care and treatment. South Africa has one of the highest rates of HIV in the world, and the U.S. had contributed 17 percent of the nation’s $400 million HIV budget. This funding supported the anti-retroviral medication for HIV treatment of 5.5 million people annually. According to some estimates, the aid freeze could cause over half a million deaths in South Africa over the next decade.
In terms of the larger South African economy and possible fallout from U.S. cuts, the United States is South Africa’s second-largest export market (China is number one), with $14.7 billion worth of goods exported to the United States in 2024. South Africa also benefits from the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), a preferential trade program providing duty-free access to U.S. markets. If the Trump administration removes South Africa from AGOA eligibility, its exports will surely plummet.
To make matters worse, this week the U.S. stopped the disbursement of $2.6 billion to South Africa through the World Bank’s Climate Investment Fund, monies that are supposed to help South Africa transition from coal to cleaner energy sources.
The Trump administration’s tough stance on South Africa is certainly meant to warn other countries about the consequences of challenging the United States. But Trump’s actions may well backfire. In response to the cut-off in aid and trade, 100 Parliamentarians from around the world penned a letter calling on their own governments to support South Africa’s public health programs and to expand new avenues for international trade as a sign of “international solidarity with the South African people as they face this assault on their right to self-determination.” South Africa is also a key player in the growing alliance of BRICs, a grouping of large countries trying to counter the economic clout of the United States. The BRICs nations now represent roughly 45 percent of the world’s populations and 35 percent of global GDP.
Trump’s expulsion and threats have also had a unifying effect inside South Africa. Ambassador Rasool, who says he has no regrets, was greeted by a massive crowd as he landed in Cape Town. For the people of South Africa and worldwide who oppose white supremacy, Rasool is not a disgraced ambassador. He is a hero.
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