President Trump Predictably Ambushes South African President

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One of the 20th Century's greatest achievements was Nobel Prize winners President Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and many others defeating the openly racist South African Apartheid system. For about 30 years, the country has been a multi-racial democracy. The minority white oppressors were even offered reconciliatiom and invited to stay. The country remains one of Africa's few democracies despite crime, inequality, and other problems.

Yet America's President recently ridiculed this relatively new nation. Trump has no shame. During an Oval Office meeting with the South African President, Trump created a predictable false ambush by suddenly showing a video of fringe far left anti-white politicians. These characters are basically jokes, even in much of South Africa.  Trump used the video and ambush to bolster a shameful fiction that South Africa is committing genocide against South African farmers so they must be allowed to immigrate to the US (while we arbitrarily deport people of color without due process.) Statistics, however, show nothing like genocide.

Moreover, we just learned that Trump's Secretary of Homeland Security is too ignorant to know the meaning of habeas corpus -- the essence of real liberty. Even conservative former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia voted to use the Great Writ, by contrast, to protect a former Guantanamo detainee.

The bottom line is that almost everything Trump says about South African migration is anti-Black propganda, as I mentioned in an earlier post. Moreover, as Professor Dorf noted in a follow-up, the policy is illegal and unconstitutional.

Trump is the great separator of migrant parents from children, so he has no standing on these issues. During the Oval Office meeting, Trump' favorite interactions were with several white South African golf stars. They are celebrated, not imprisoned, in South Africa. At the meeting, however, Trump did suggest he would not mind the gift of another 400 million dollar plane. Then he might treat South Africa differently.

--Mark Kende