CNN
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The 40-year arc of US relations with South Africa goes something like this:
► In 1984, President Ronald Reagan wrote in his diary that Desmond Tutu was “naive” for pressuring him — unsuccessfully — to support sanctions to pressure South Africa to end apartheid. Reagan refused to confront South Africa’s White regime in that way.
► In 2025, President Donald Trump cut aid to South Africa back in February and then ambushed post-apartheid South African President Cyril Ramaphosa with right-wing allegations of “genocide” against the country’s White minority that are not backed by evidence. He put the country’s Black president on the spot in front of TV cameras on Wednesday.
“I will say, apartheid – terrible,” Trump told Ramaphosa, as he prepared to complain there isn’t more awareness of the plight of Whites in South Africa. “This is sort of the opposite of apartheid,” the US president said, although he did not mean it as a good thing.
Trump came armed with videos of South Africa’s militant political minority, printouts from right-wing websites, two professional golfers and Elon Musk to demand that Ramaphosa do more for the White minority that controls most of the farmland in his country.
Repeatedly using the term “genocide,” Trump created an uncomfortable scene when he lowered the lights to play video of the militant political opposition in South Africa and told Ramaphosa that White farmers in the country are being persecuted, repeating claims that percolate in the right-wing ecosystem.
Read CNN’s fact check. There is no “genocide” against White South African farmers.
It was a much calmer Oval Office scene when Reagan had to be pressured to make room in his schedule for Archbishop Desmond Tutu, newly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and on a mission to get Western democracies to impose sanctions on South Africa’s apartheid regime.
Tutu called the Reagan administration “immoral” for pursuing an appeasing strategy of “constructive engagement” with the regime.
After meeting with Tutu, Regan wrote in his diary that Tutu was “naive” about sanctions. Reagan thought “quiet diplomacy” was doing plenty to improve the lives of Black South Africans.
“The Bishop seems unaware, even though he himself is Black, that part of the problem is tribal not racial,” Reagan wrote as if he were an expert on South Africa. “If apartheid ended now there still would be civil strife between the Black tribes,” he argued in the diary.
Reagan would ultimately veto sanctions approved by Congress in 1986, a decision that has not aged well. Lawmakers overrode Reagan’s veto and imposed the sanctions anyway, one of only a handful of times lawmakers so overwhelmingly corrected Reagan.
“Because I have chosen to stand with those who struggle for freedom, I must stand apart from my president,” then-freshman Sen. Mitch McConnell said at the time.
Tutu would go on to accuse Reagan of being racist for opposing sanctions.
“Certainly the support of this racist policy is racist,” Tutu told the New York Times in 1985.
Now it’s Trump all but accusing South African’s post-apartheid government of racism for not doing enough to protect White farmers.
Trump has also welcomed White refugees from South Africa into the US even as he closed the US to all other refugees.
“We have many people that feel that they’re being persecuted,” Trump told Ramaphosa. “And they’re coming to the United States, and we take from many locations if we feel there is persecution or genocide going on,” he said.
At the same time, Trump bragged that because of a Supreme Court ruling, he will be able to deport Venezuelans who he said are criminals.
It was by coincidence that I was learning about Reagan’s history with South Africa from the biography “Reagan: His Life and Legend” by the historian Max Boot on the same day Trump created a scene with Ramaphosa in the Oval Office.
I reached out to Boot to get his reaction.
Here are his two cents, which he sent by email:
South Africa has long been a touchstone for America’s own racial relations, with opponents of civil rights in the United States decrying pressure on South Africa to end apartheid. Republican politicians — including Ronald Reagan — spent many years catering to those sentiments by opposing tough sanctions on South Africa. Yet when apartheid did fall, the result was not — as so many American conservatives predicted — a race war or a Marxist dictatorship. It was a free-market, multi-ethnic democracy in which the white minority continued to control a disproportionate share of the country’s wealth. So it is dismaying to see President Trump today repeating the canards of white extremists who claim that Afrikaners have been victims of “genocide.” This is dog-whistle politics at its most ridiculous.
Patrick Gaspard was US ambassador to South Afrida under President Barack Obama. He told me that Trump’s confrontation of Ramaphosa confirmed his worst fears of what might happen — “a crass appeal to the worst element in society.”
White South Africans, Gaspard said, represent a small minority in the country, but own much of the land. Farmers account for only a fraction of murder victims, so Trump’s arguments are not backed up by fact.
South African authorities strongly reject the allegation that there is genocide in their country, as CNN’s Nimi Princewill reported in a larger story about Afrikaners who want to stay in South Africa with help from the US.
“It’s astonishing to see that kind of behavior and performance in the Oval Office, but we all shrug it off and move on to the next scandal with this guy,” Gaspard said. He added that the inclusion of Musk and the South African billionaire Johann Rupert, who called for Musk’s Starlink to be provided to South Africa, gave the meeting the feel of a grift.
The more profound difference between the Trump era and the Reagan era is that 40 years ago, Republican lawmakers — like McConnell, who is still in office — rejected Reagan’s approach.
“That’s the gulf that exists here,” Gaspard said. “It’s not the gulf between Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump. It’s a gulf between the young Mitch McConnell and the party that he now helps to preside over that seems to have lost its tongue and its spine.”
The domestic political effect of Trump’s confrontation is that for Wednesday, at least, his failure on Capitol Hill was knocked off TV screens, replaced by the latest in a series of cringey dressings-down of foreign leaders. Trump might rather appear strong in the Oval Office than dwell on the reality that deficit hawk House Republicans in the Freedom Caucus have, for now, placed a blockade on the “big, beautiful bill” that would extend his tax cuts and cut Medicaid and SNAP (food stamp) spending while still adding trillions to the national debt over the next 10 years.
But it’s hard to believe the trap Trump laid for Ramaphosa was simply to control headlines, given how prepared Trump appeared to be with his presentation.
Reagan’s belief was that free trade between the US and South Africa’s apartheid regime would ultimately lead to change. It’s another indication of how the GOP has shifted; Ramaphosa came into the meeting to talk about trade, but that part of the conversation did not happen in front of TV cameras. The topic of the day was for Trump to advocate for White farmers.
Ramaphosa signed a law this year allowing the government to seize land if it is deemed to be in the public interest, something Trump criticized, although Ramaphosa compared it to the seizure of land in the US by eminent domain.
It is a full-circle moment for American presidents.
