South Africa appears to have subtly shifted its attitude towards Donald Trump from appeasement to confrontation, as the US president’s support in his home country hits historic lows.
Recent statements by the country’s political leaders suggest a change from the accommodating stance evident when President Cyril Ramaphosa met Trump in the White House in May 2025, accompanied by golfers Ernie Els and Retief Goosen. At the time, even when Trump falsely claimed that footage of white crosses marked the graves of dead farmers, Ramaphosa demurred from correcting him.
But in recent days, the minister of international relations & co-operation, Ronald Lamola, has described Trump’s “refugee programme” for Afrikaners and other minority groups as “apartheid 2.0” and a clear “race-based policy”.
In comments to various media houses, as well as in Washington when addressing the African Diaspora Forum, Lamola depicted Trump’s opposition to South Africa as a proxy for his rejection of diversity in the US.
Lamola has also doubled down on one of Trump’s sore points: the genocide case against Israel that South Africa lodged with the International Court of Justice in the Hague. Speaking in Washington last week, Lamola said “the world has a duty to stop” the “painful genocide” in Gaza.
Visa bans loom
These comments didn’t come from nowhere: two weeks ago, US secretary of state Marco Rubio escalated the diplomatic war between the two countries when he announced visa restrictions on South African leaders who were implementing “race-based discriminatory legislation”.
Trump’s ambassador to South Africa, Leo Brent Bozell, said the country had failed to address all the “five asks” from Washington, including condemning Julius Malema’s singing of Kill the Boer and making farm murders a priority crime.
Lamola, however, said Bozell himself “knows deep in his heart” that there is no white genocide, but cannot say so because of Trump’s own position.
This week in his weekly newsletter, Ramaphosa added tinder to the fire. Without naming anyone, he said: “Travelling to foreign capitals to spread the falsehood of a ‘white genocide’ and discourage investment in one’s own country is neither responsible nor patriotic.”
It came as Ernst Roets, a divisive figure who now heads the Lex Libertas think tank, erected 3,000 crosses in Washington’s National Mall last weekend to symbolise the victims of farm attacks.
While Roets’s stunt failed to grab much US media attention, it drew widespread condemnation from groups such as Afrikaners for South Africa, which said Lex Libertas did not speak for all Afrikaners. “The campaign exploits the suffering of farm victims to advance a narrow political agenda, presents Americans with a misleading picture of South Africa and risks deepening racial divisions at home,” it said.
The point was echoed by Roelf Meyer, South Africa’s ambassador to the US, who told eNCA that Roets’s claim of political persecution is “very dangerous, because, first of all, it’s not true”.
This illustrates, not that it needed saying, that there’s no unanimity among Afrikaners. AfriForum CEO Kallie Kriel, for instance, has repeatedly said his organisation “disagrees” with Trump that there is a white genocide, but is thankful that the US president is raising the issue of how Afrikaners are being treated.
What everyone does agree on, however, is that crime is out of control, including on farms, and police seem powerless to halt it — a point underscored by the international coverage of the 12 women’s bodies discovered in Ekurhuleni and the mass murders in Wedela, Lwandle and KwaMakhutha.
Risking Agoa fallout
Nonetheless, after Lamola’s pointed criticism of the White House, several reports have emerged warning that his intemperate response risked South Africa’s exclusion from the African Growth & Opportunity Act duty-free list.
This may be true, but it seems there is a realisation in the Union Buildings that hopes of détente are effectively over, and there’s no point accommodating a fiction that can only harm South Africa’s standing around the globe. It may also be a calculated bet that South Africa can afford to simply wait out the 27 months until Trump’s term ends, at a time when his war in Iran has significantly weakened his standing at home.
Weeks out from that country’s mid-term elections, Trump’s approval rating has sunk to 37%, according to a Wall Street Journal poll this week. This is the lowest of any president at that point in his term, the newspaper said.
Nonetheless, Trump, as much as he still cares about what happens in South Africa rather than at the gas tanks at home, or in the Strait of Hormuz, is unlikely to back down until he leaves the White House. The gloves are well and truly off.
