Postcards from a parallel universe: Trump, tariffs, and the Great South African safari

It started, as all great diplomatic incidents do these days, with a PowerPoint presentation designed by a man who once failed Microsoft Paint.

 

There sat South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, a seasoned statesman, trying to maintain his composure in the White House. Across from him, President Donald Trump—Commander-in-Chief, Golf-Resort-Developer-in-Chief, and Clipboard-Holder-in-Chief—leafed through a stack of printouts like a demented postmaster on amphetamines. “Death. Death. Death,” he declared with evangelical certainty, pointing at grainy screenshots that looked like a rejected CSI: Pretoria episode.

 

The scene had the surreal energy of Zelenskyy: The Sequel, except this time the foreign leader wasn’t begging for weapons—he was begging for facts.

 

Ramaphosa, visibly baffled, peered at the video Trump played. “That’s not South Africa,” he said gently, as if talking down a man convinced he was showing him the moon but had accidentally pointed to a halogen lightbulb in Walmart.

 

But Trump was undeterred. Reality had RSVP’d “No.” He had postcards to wave and MAGA fantasies to feed.

 

The Great White Scare.

 

Trump’s obsession with “land seizures” and “white genocide” in South Africa isn’t new. It’s a cocktail of half-baked Breitbart headlines, Fox News fever dreams, and Elon Musk tweets stirred together and served warm under a Confederate flag.

 

In his mind, white South Africans are the endangered species, grazing peacefully until mauled by Black Marxists wielding copies of Nelson Mandela’s autobiography and reclaimed title deeds. He clutches this narrative like a toddler with a stuffed animal. Except the toddler has nuclear codes, and the animal is racism in woolly nationalist drag.

 

Never mind that South African police data shows white farmers are statistically less likely to be murdered than the average citizen. Or that land reform, while fraught, is a decades-overdue response to apartheid’s still-gaping scars. Trump was playing to an audience. And it wasn’t Ramaphosa.

 

A Performance for the Deep South and the Even Deeper North.

 

The performance was really aimed at the camera lenses peering in from Mississippi to Middlesbrough. This was red meat for the Tommy Robinson brigade. For the Anglo-Saxon supremacists across the Atlantic who keep photos of Enoch Powell in their wallets. For the “Gone With the Wind” nostalgists who think MAGA is both a political slogan and a genealogy service.

 

Over in South Africa, Elon Musk watched the moment with a knowing grin. Born on that soil, Musk has become the spiritual Uber-driver of this narrative, ferrying ideas between Silicon Valley and Pretoria at the speed of meme. He’s long promoted the “white farmer under siege” line, conveniently ignoring the systemic theft that made many of those farms “white” in the first place.

 

And so the circle completes: Trump, with his postcards and tariffs; Musk, with his satellites and apartheid-tinged childhood; Robinson, with his bullhorn and Facebook Live; and a host of red-faced pundits pretending they know where Limpopo is.

 

One Rule for White, One for the Rest.

 

And in case you thought this was just some eccentric outburst, a side note: the Trump administration welcomed white South African immigrants while simultaneously suspending refugee programmes for, well, everyone else. Syrians? Too brown. Sudanese? Too Muslim. Haitians? Definitely not the right kind of shithole, apparently.

 

So much for “we don’t see race.”

 

Meanwhile, a judge ruled that Trump’s team had violated a court order by secretly deporting migrants to South Sudan—an actual warzone—faster than you can say “due process.” But don’t worry: white South Africans got fast-track access, presumably because their struggle looked more palatable on a Fox News chyron.

 

Death, Tariffs, Elon and Other Unreliable Narrators.

 

This wasn’t diplomacy. It was cosplay. Trump wasn’t interested in hearing Ramaphosa. He was trying to out-Zelenskyy Zelenskyy. Not to protect democracy, but to stage-manage a pantomime of white victimhood for political theatre.

 

It was, in short, a rerun of every Trumpian instinct:

• Find a grievance

• Whiten it

• Weaponise it

• Sell it back to the base like a pillow made in China.

 

And here’s the kicker: while Trump railed against supposed land grabs in South Africa, he was simultaneously trying to seize American farmland by eminent domain to build his border wall. But that was different. Those were Mexicans.

 

As for Ramaphosa, he left the White House no doubt pondering how, in a supposed land of free speech and intelligence, he’d just been held hostage by a clipboard.

 

Final Postcard from the Edge.

 

So here we are. Postcards from a parallel universe. Trump’s version of South Africa is a colonial fever dream wrapped in Breitbart fonts and Elon’s WiFi. It plays well to the base who never passed geography and think Johannesburg is in Texas.

 

It’s a cautionary tale. When power is handed to men who weaponise delusion, what follows is not policy. It’s performance. The kind that lets white fragility masquerade as foreign policy and racially-coded fiction pass for international relations.

 

History, as ever, is watching.

 

But first, another postcard.

 

“Death. Death. Death.”

 

No Mr. Trump, that’s just the WiFi signal dropping at Mar-a-Lago.

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