They Were Waiting for Trump All Along
by Jamelle Bouie
May 14, 2025
New York Times
Credit: Daniel Ribar for The New York Times
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Of the endless torrent of illegal, unconstitutional — and anti-constitutional — actions flowing from the Trump administration, there are three that stand out for their contempt for the rule of law.
There is the president’s ongoing assault on the right to due process, seen in his administration’s refusal to facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man who was arrested in Baltimore in March and removed to a prison in El Salvador. Not only is the White House ignoring an order from the Supreme Court that sought to bring Garcia back to the United States, but its spokesmen insist on tarring Garcia as a “terrorist” and “human smuggler” in an escalating series of attacks on his character.
Other Republicans, it should be said, have backed the administration on this point, insisting that due process does not apply to undocumented or unauthorized immigrants. “When it comes to due process, that is a privilege reserved for American citizens,” Representative Byron Donalds of Florida, a vocal ally of the president, said on NBC. Donalds should probably consult the Constitution, which makes no mention of citizenship or immigration status in either of the two amendments, the fifth and the 14th, that guarantee the right of due process to all “persons.”
If the framers and ratifiers of these amendments had intended to differentiate between citizens and noncitizens, they would have done so. That is especially true for the authors of the 14th Amendment, who were preoccupied with questions of rights and citizenship, and who dealt with nativism and anti-immigrant sentiment within their own political coalitions. They could have written a due process clause whose protection only went as far as native and naturalized citizens. They chose not to.
The second incident is the suggestion, by the White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, that the president might suspend habeas corpus to keep federal courts from releasing the administration’s detainees — thus blocking its efforts to remove, among others, some lawful residents from the country. “Well, the Constitution is clear,” Miller said in a briefing with journalists last week outside the White House, “that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in a time of invasion.” It’s an option, he continued, that the administration is “actively looking at” and which “depends on whether the courts do the right thing or not.”
Habeas corpus — Medieval Latin for “you have the body” — is a proceeding used to adjudicate the legality of any given individual’s detention, incarceration or imprisonment. When a judge issues a writ of habeas corpus, the government has to prove that it is the lawful custodian of the individual in question. Habeas corpus is one of the oldest principles in the English legal tradition, dating back to the 13th century. And it was of special significance to Americans, whose rebellion led Parliament in 1777 to suspend habeas corpus in what the legal scholar Steve Vladeck describes as an “unprecedented” manner. The language of this suspension, he writes, “set a dangerous precedent for future suspensions in England, suggesting that Parliament could displace the writ based upon status, and without either of the constraints (necessity and duration) that had characterized every previous suspension.”
It was in part this experience that led Americans to write explicit protection of the writ of habeas corpus into their state constitutions following independence, and which led delegates at the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 to write a nearly inviolable protection of the writ into their new federal constitution. “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended,” reads Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution, “unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.”
With regard to the framers’ reverence for habeas, it should be emphasized that, as the legal scholar Francis Paschal observed in 1970, “There is abundant evidence of an early and persisting attachment to ‘this darling privilege’ in pre-1787 America. Indeed, in the Philadelphia Convention and in the struggle for ratification, there was never the slightest objection to according a special pre-eminence to the Great Writ.”
Habeas corpus is such a bedrock part of the American legal tradition that its suspension during the Civil War — an actual rebellion, a large part of it happening within riding distance of the Capitol — was hugely controversial. In the first months of the conflict, in 1861, Abraham Lincoln directed Gen. Winfield Scott to suspend habeas near the railroad lines that ran from Washington into Philadelphia, in order to circumvent rebel activity in Maryland, a slave state. What followed was a legal confrontation that ended in a rebuke of Lincoln by Chief Justice Roger Taney, acting as the senior judge on the U.S. Circuit Court for Maryland, which he oversaw. “I can see no ground whatever for supposing that the President in any emergency or in any state of things can authorize the suspension of the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus, or arrest a citizen except in aid of the judicial power,” Taney said.
That summer, Lincoln would ask Congress to retroactively authorize his suspension of the writ. He argued that he was acting in Congress’s stead while it was out of a session — tacit admission that he may have been operating outside the bounds of the Constitution. Congress obliged and would later, in 1863, authorize Lincoln to suspend habeas as he saw fit for the duration of the conflict.
This is all to say that whatever you think of recent migration to the United States, it is not a rebellion. Nor is it, as the president would argue, an invasion. In back-to-back rulings issued this month, two federal judges agreed that an invasion of the kind that might justify the administration’s detentions and removals requires “military action,” although on Tuesday night a third federal judge sided with the administration. Even so, common sense tells us that migrants crossing a border do not constitute military action. And President Trump is most certainly not Abraham Lincoln.
The last, and by comparison relatively minor, instance of constitutional subversion by this administration is the president’s plan to accept a $400 million luxury aircraft to temporarily replace Air Force One, provided to the United States by the royal family of Qatar. When he leaves office, that plane is set to be given to the Trump presidential library, where the future ex-president can maintain it for personal use, should he choose to do so.
This may not meet the strict legal definition of corruption as established by the Supreme Court (in decisions that have all but legalized an unspoken quid pro quo of money, gifts and favors in the American political system). But a supposed gift of this sort meets every reasonable definition of the term and represents the kind of venality that the framers were desperate to shield against in their new government. “One of the weak sides of republics, among their numerous advantages,” Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 22, “is that they afford too easy an inlet to foreign corruption.”
To that point, the Constitution includes three separate clauses forbidding the collection of “emoluments” by federal office holders, including one that is as explicit as anything you’ll find in the document: “No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”
In the absence of Congressional authorization — and an agreement to place the aircraft under the direct and permanent ownership of the federal government — the president cannot accept this gift without violating the Constitution, even if he is doing so on behalf of the United States.
Trump’s decision to accept it — he’ll take anybody’s luxury jet, if they’re just giving it away — is one of the most shameless acts of corruption in the history of the American presidency, dwarfed only by this president’s other acts of brazen corruption, self-dealing and personal enrichment.
Take these constitutional violations together and you have a clear picture of how this president sees himself and his office in his second term. The presidency, for Trump, is a vehicle for his personalist rule, in which all power flows from his person. It is a virtual extension of Trump himself, and in the same way that we control our bodies, he holds authority over the entire body politic, with the power to detain and remove anyone he’d like, without explanation, justification or even cursory legal proceedings. The presidency is also, in this vision, his to use as he sees fit, up to and including endless self-enrichment and personal aggrandizement, with no regard for the public good.
This is the president as elected despot. It is a conception of the office that is inimical to the American political tradition in every respect.
This is the president as elected despot. It is a conception of the office that is inimical to the American political tradition in every respect.
But somewhat more interesting than the president’s abuse of power is the indifference — or active support — of both the Republican Party and the conservative movement. One might think that even with its zeal for tax cuts and right-wing social engineering, the conservative movement’s reverence for both the founding fathers and the nation’s revolutionary heritage would not overwhelm a basic respect for the hard-fought rights and privileges of the American way of life. You would think that those who elevate 1776, who fetishize the Constitution as an object and who practically spend every waking moment reminding the public of their patriotic bona fides would, at some point, have something to say about this perversion of the American republic.
You would be wrong. The Republican Party is, with only a few quibbles and some occasionally timid disagreement, united in support of Donald Trump. Conservative intellectuals have spent the last decade spinning endless excuses for the president and his allies. They treat his tyrannical aspirations as little more than a curiosity, or even a justified response to some imagined revolutionary movement of the political and cultural left. Both the MAGA cheerleaders of the Claremont Institute and the Trump rationalizers in the nation’s premier publications agree: Nothing Trump has done, or wants to do, is beyond the pale. Everything is a necessary and defensive act in the war against “critical race theory” or “gender ideology” or so-called wokeness.
This attitude, while shocking in its moral and ethical decadence, is not all that surprising. As the writer and editor Jacob Heilbrunn shows in “America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators,” the conservative movement has always had a soft spot for despots of various stripes. The political and intellectual antecedents of the Trump movement, stretching all the way back to the early 20th century, have often had nothing but praise for those despotic rulers who extinguished the freedom of the many for the liberty of the few, from Gen. Francisco Franco in Spain and Gen. Augusto Pinochet in Chile to, at this moment, Vladimir Putin in Russia and Viktor Orban in Hungary. (Not to mention the American right’s long love affair with apartheid South Africa.)
This is not to say that the political left has never been guilty of affection for tyrants. But among conservatives there is a strong, coherent and distinctly under-discussed tradition of support and affection for the enemies of liberal democracy around the world.
Which brings us back to the current president. What Trump brings to the table of American politics is personalist and authoritarian rule of a kind that we haven’t seen in the national government, but that we have seen in other countries — and even in certain places at certain points in our own history.
But whether you think this moment is continuous with our past, or a break from it, one thing we can say for sure is that conservative support for this type of governance is not an aberration. It belongs to a consistent pattern of enthusiastic support for tyrants and would-be tyrants. This is who they are, this is what they’ve been and, whenever the age of Trump passes, this is who they’ll be. What it should signal to observers of American politics is that there won’t be a time when either the conservative movement or the Republican Party truly changes course.
There is no “Trumpified” conservative movement. There never was. There is only the conservative movement that was, we can see now, waiting for its Donald Trump.
More on Trump and power:
Opinion | Thomas B. Edsall
This Is Why Trump Is Always Talking About Corruption
May 13, 2025
Opinion | Steven Levitsky, Lucan Way and Daniel Ziblatt
How Will We Know When We Have Lost Our Democracy?
May 8, 2025
Opinion | Steven Rattner
Trump’s Biggest Beneficiary: Himself
April 27, 2025
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jamelle Bouie became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2019. Before that he was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. He is based in Charlottesville, Va., and Washington. @jbouie
Noura Erakat Addresses the UN in Commemoration of the 77th Anniversary of the Nakba
Jadaliyya
May 16, 2025
VIDEO:
Noura Erakat Addresses the UN in Commemoration of the 77th Anniversary of the Nakba
Jadaliyya
May 16, 2025
VIDEO:
Comemmorating the 77th anniversary of the start of the Nakba, Jadaliyya Co-Editor Noura Erakat addressed the UN. During the address, Erakat highlighted the shortcomings of international law in stopping Israel's ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza. Click here to watch the full UN commemoration of the Nakba's 77th anniversary. Featuring: Noura Erakat is a Professor of Africana Studies and the Program of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Noura is the author of Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019), which received the Palestine Book Award and the Bronze Medal for the Independent Publishers Book Award in Current Events/Foreign Affairs. She is co-founding editor of Jadaliyya and an editorial board member of the Journal of Palestine Studies as well as Human Geography. She is a co-founding board member of the DC Palestinian Film and Arts Festival. She has served as Legal Counsel for a Congressional Subcommittee in the US House of Representatives, as Legal Advocate for the Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Refugee and Residency Rights, and as national organizer of the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation.
Noura has also produced video documentaries, including "Gaza In Context" and "Black Palestinian Solidarity.” Her writings have appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Nation, Al Jazeera, and the Boston Review. She is a frequent commentator on CBS News, CNN, MSNBC, CBS, Fox News, the BBC, and NPR, among others. She completed non-resident fellowship of the Religious Literacy Project at Harvard Divinity School in 2021. In 2022, she was selected as a Freedom Fellow by the Marguerite Casey Foundation.
NYU Withholds Diploma After Student Speaks Out Against Genocide In Gaza
Noura has also produced video documentaries, including "Gaza In Context" and "Black Palestinian Solidarity.” Her writings have appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Nation, Al Jazeera, and the Boston Review. She is a frequent commentator on CBS News, CNN, MSNBC, CBS, Fox News, the BBC, and NPR, among others. She completed non-resident fellowship of the Religious Literacy Project at Harvard Divinity School in 2021. In 2022, she was selected as a Freedom Fellow by the Marguerite Casey Foundation.
NYU Withholds Diploma After Student Speaks Out Against Genocide In Gaza
NYU Withholds Diploma After Student Speaks Out Against Genocide In Gaza
The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder
Or listen via daily podcast at http://www.Majority.FM
The Daily Reid: Out of Africa
The Trump regime has shut the door to nearly all refugees, and is violently deporting many who sought refuge in the U.S. But there is one very notable exception: white South Africans…
by Joy-Ann Reid
May 14, 2025
Substack
Last October, I wrote this Substack called:
The Trump regime has shut the door to nearly all refugees, and is violently deporting many who sought refuge in the U.S. But there is one very notable exception: white South Africans…
by Joy-Ann Reid
May 14, 2025
Substack
Last October, I wrote this Substack called:
The Afrikaanerization of the Republican Party.
The focus was the “coincidence” that so many of Donald Trump and JD Vance’s ideological advisers and financial backers happen to be white South Africans, and how that connects to the white exodus from South Africa after the fall of apartheid. Trump and Vance’s major South African advisers: Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, David Sacks, as well as software developer Paul Furber, alleged to be the originator of the Qanon conspiracy theory that so feuled the rise of MAGA, are all white South Africans.
In my post, which you can read here, I explained the origins of the Apprentice-related conspiracy theory that some white South Africans, both the British, British-Canadian and German expat types (like the Musk, Thiel and Sacks’ clans) and the older-era Dutch settlers who adopted an identity they call “Afrikaaner,” to give themselves the patina of African indigeneity, have clung to. To summarize, believers in the conspiracy theory believe that at any moment, white South Africans will be dispossessed of the land they dispossessed actual indigenous Africans of, and/or slaughtered in a “white genocide” akin to what their ancestors visited on the Africans they encountered upon their uninvited arrival to the continent.
Apparently, among the believers in this conspiracy theory, which is supported by exactly zero facts or history, are Tucker Carlson, and his apprentice, Donald Trump, who has now reversed his otherwise “no immigrants allowed” policy to throw open America’s doors to Afrikaaners and Afrikaaners only.
Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau, right, greets Afrikaner refugees from South Africa, Monday, May 12, 2025, at Dulles International Airport in Dulles, Va. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)
And so this week, the first tranche of a few dozen apparently desperate white “refugees” from so very Black Africa, were greeted personally by high level government officials as they disembarked their survial airlift in preparation for immediate resettlement and a fast-track to U.S. citizenship:
The first group of White South African refugees arrived in the U.S. on Monday under President Trump's executive order mandating they be prioritized for resettlement — even as the broader refugee program remains largely on hold.
The 59 Afrikaners, descendants of mainly Dutch colonists, underwent expedited reviews that took months, were brought to the U.S. on a government-chartered flight, and were greeted at Dulles International Airport by federal officials — all unconventional steps for the refugee resettlement program, which can take years to process.
Families on Monday arrived at the airport with their luggage; children donned pajamas and carried small American flags and stuffed animals as their parents walked them through a private airplane hanger.
Troy Edgar, deputy Homeland Security secretary, and Christopher Landau, the deputy secretary of state, greeted the families, shaking hands and posing for photos.
"Welcome to America," Landau told the families. "I want you to know that you are really welcome here."
Mr. Landau was asked by a reporter, why the Afrikaaners get an exception, and this is what he said: “the criteria are, making sure that refugees did not pose any challenge to our national security, and that they could be assimilated easily into our country.” Huh… video here.
The poor, persecuted Afrikaaners…
Also, the word “refugees” is doing a lot of work in that piece above … as is the word “colonists.” Here’s a bit of actual history, from the good folks at Britannica (it will sound familiar to anyone familiar with the history of the United States, Brazil, and all of the Caribbean…) [all emphases added]
The focus was the “coincidence” that so many of Donald Trump and JD Vance’s ideological advisers and financial backers happen to be white South Africans, and how that connects to the white exodus from South Africa after the fall of apartheid. Trump and Vance’s major South African advisers: Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, David Sacks, as well as software developer Paul Furber, alleged to be the originator of the Qanon conspiracy theory that so feuled the rise of MAGA, are all white South Africans.
In my post, which you can read here, I explained the origins of the Apprentice-related conspiracy theory that some white South Africans, both the British, British-Canadian and German expat types (like the Musk, Thiel and Sacks’ clans) and the older-era Dutch settlers who adopted an identity they call “Afrikaaner,” to give themselves the patina of African indigeneity, have clung to. To summarize, believers in the conspiracy theory believe that at any moment, white South Africans will be dispossessed of the land they dispossessed actual indigenous Africans of, and/or slaughtered in a “white genocide” akin to what their ancestors visited on the Africans they encountered upon their uninvited arrival to the continent.
Apparently, among the believers in this conspiracy theory, which is supported by exactly zero facts or history, are Tucker Carlson, and his apprentice, Donald Trump, who has now reversed his otherwise “no immigrants allowed” policy to throw open America’s doors to Afrikaaners and Afrikaaners only.
And so this week, the first tranche of a few dozen apparently desperate white “refugees” from so very Black Africa, were greeted personally by high level government officials as they disembarked their survial airlift in preparation for immediate resettlement and a fast-track to U.S. citizenship:
The first group of White South African refugees arrived in the U.S. on Monday under President Trump's executive order mandating they be prioritized for resettlement — even as the broader refugee program remains largely on hold.
The 59 Afrikaners, descendants of mainly Dutch colonists, underwent expedited reviews that took months, were brought to the U.S. on a government-chartered flight, and were greeted at Dulles International Airport by federal officials — all unconventional steps for the refugee resettlement program, which can take years to process.
Families on Monday arrived at the airport with their luggage; children donned pajamas and carried small American flags and stuffed animals as their parents walked them through a private airplane hanger.
Troy Edgar, deputy Homeland Security secretary, and Christopher Landau, the deputy secretary of state, greeted the families, shaking hands and posing for photos.
"Welcome to America," Landau told the families. "I want you to know that you are really welcome here."
Mr. Landau was asked by a reporter, why the Afrikaaners get an exception, and this is what he said: “the criteria are, making sure that refugees did not pose any challenge to our national security, and that they could be assimilated easily into our country.” Huh… video here.
The poor, persecuted Afrikaaners…
Also, the word “refugees” is doing a lot of work in that piece above … as is the word “colonists.” Here’s a bit of actual history, from the good folks at Britannica (it will sound familiar to anyone familiar with the history of the United States, Brazil, and all of the Caribbean…) [all emphases added]
Europeans in South Africa
The first Portuguese ships rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, their occupants intent on gaining a share of the lucrative Arab trade with the East. Over the following century, numerous vessels made their way around the South African coast, but the only direct African contacts came with the bands of shipwreck survivors who either set up camp in the hope of rescue or tried to make their way northward to Portuguese settlements in present-day Mozambique. Both the British and the Dutch challenged the Portuguese control of the Cape sea route from the early 17th century. The British founded a short-lived settlement at Table Bay in 1620, and in 1652 the Dutch East India Company set up a small garrison under the slopes of Table Mountain for provisioning their fleets.
Settlement of the Cape Colony
The Dutch East India Company, always mindful of unnecessary expense, did not intend to establish more than a minimal presence at the southernmost part of Africa. Because farming beyond the shores of Table Bay proved necessary, however, nine men were released from their contracts with the company and granted land along the Liesbeek River in 1657. The company made it clear that the Khoekhoe were not to be enslaved, so, beginning in that same year, slaves arrived in the Cape from West and East Africa, India, and the Malay Peninsula. By the end of the century, the imprint of Dutch colonialism in South Africa was clear, with settlers, aided by increasing numbers of slaves, growing wheat, tending vineyards, and grazing their sheep and cattle from the Cape peninsula to the Hottentots Holland Mountains some 30 miles (50 km) away. A 1707 census of the Dutch at the Cape listed 1,779 settlers owning 1,107 slaves.
In the initial years of Dutch settlement at the Cape, pastoralists had readily traded with the Dutch. However, as the garrison’s demand for cattle and sheep continued to increase, the Khoekhoe became more wary. The Dutch offered tobacco, alcohol, and trinkets for livestock. Numerous conflicts followed, and, beginning in 1713, many Khoekhoe communities were ravaged by smallpox. At the same time, colonial pastoralists—the Boers, also called trekboers—began to move inland beyond the Hottentots Holland Mountains with their own herds. The Khoekhoe chiefdoms were largely decimated by the end of the 18th century, their people either dead or reduced to conditions close to serfdom on colonial farms.
The San–small bands of huntergatherers-fared no better. Pushed back into marginal areas, they were forced to live by cattle raiding, justifying in colonial eyes their systematic eradication. The men were slaughtered, and the women and children were taken into servitude.
The trekboers constantly sought new land, and they and their families spread northeast as well as north, into the grasslands that long had been occupied by African farmers. …
…by the closing decades of the 18th century, South Africa had fallen into two broad regions: west and east. Colonial settlement dominated the west, including the winter rainfall region around the Cape of Good Hope, the coastal hinterland northward toward the present-day border with Namibia, and the dry lands of the interior. Trekboers took increasingly more land from the Khoekhoe and from remnant hunter-gatherer communities, who were killed, were forced into marginal areas, or became laborers tied to the farms of their new overlords. …
… The Portuguese and also some British, French, Americans, and Arabs traded beads, brass, cloth, alcohol, and firearms along the southeast coast in return for ivory, slaves, cattle, gold, wax, and skins. During the late 18th century, large volumes of ivory were exported annually from Delagoa Bay, and slaves were taken from the Komati and Usutu (a major tributary of the Maputo) river regions and sent to the Mascarene Islands in the Indian Ocean and to Brazil to work on sugarcane and coffee plantations. By 1800 trade routes linked Delagoa Bay and coastal trade routes with the central interior. …
…The Cape Colony had spawned the subcolonies of Natal, the Orange Free State, and the Transvaal by the 1860s. European settlement advanced to the edges of the Kalahari region in the west, the Drakensberg and Natal coast in the east, and the tsetse-fly- and mosquito-ridden Lowveld along the Limpopo River valley in the northeast. Armed clashes erupted over land and cattle, such as those between the Boers and various Xhosa groups in the southeast beginning in the 1780s, and Africans lost most of their land and were henceforth forced to work for the settlers. The population of European settlers increased from some 20,000 in the 1780s to about 300,000 in the late 1860s. Although it is difficult to accurately estimate the African population, it probably numbered somewhere between two and four million.
Then, as often happens, the Africans got caught up in Europe’s mess…
When Great Britain went to war with France in 1793, both countries tried to capture the Cape so as to control the important sea route to the East. The British occupied the Cape in 1795, ending the Dutch East India Company’s role in the region. Although the British relinquished the colony to the Dutch in the Treaty of Amiens (1802), they reannexed it in 1806 after the start of the Napoleonic Wars. The Cape became a vital base for Britain prior to the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, and the Cape’s economy was meshed with that of Britain. To protect the developing economy there, Cape wines were given preferential access to the British market until the mid-1820s. Merino sheep were introduced, and intensive sheep farming was initiated in order to supply wool to British textile mills.
The infrastructure of the colony began to change: English replaced Dutch as the language of administration; the British pound sterling replaced the Dutch rix-dollar; and newspaper publishing began in Cape Town in 1824. After Britain began appointing colonial governors, an advisory council for the governor was established in 1825, which was upgraded to a legislative council in 1834 with a few “unofficial” settler representatives. A virtual freehold system of landownership gradually replaced the existing Dutch tenant system, under which European colonists had paid a small annual fee to the government but had not acquired land ownership.
A large group of British settlers arrived in 1820; this, together with a high European birth rate and wasteful land usage, produced an acute land shortage, which was alleviated only when the British acquired more land through massive military intervention against Africans on the eastern frontier. Until the 1840s the British vision of the colony did not include African citizens (referred to pejoratively by the British as “Kaffirs”), so, as Africans lost their land, they were expelled across the Great Fish River, the unilaterally proclaimed eastern border of the colony.
… The British had chronic difficulties procuring enough labor to build towns and develop new farms. Indeed, though Britain abolished its slave trade in 1807 and pressured other countries to do the same, the British in Southern Africa continued to import some slaves into the Cape after that date, but in numbers insufficient to alleviate the labor problem. A ban in 1809 on Africans crossing into the Cape aggravated the labor shortage, and so the British, like the Dutch before them, made the Khoe serfs through the Caledon (1809) and Cradock (1812) codes.
Anglo-Boer commandos provided another source of African labor by illegally capturing San women and children (many of the men were killed) as well as Africans from across the eastern frontier. Griqua raiding states led by Andries Waterboer, Adam Kok, and Barend Barends captured more Africans from among people such as the Hurutshe, Rolong, and Kwena. Other people, such as those known as the Mantatees, were forced to become farmworkers, mainly in the eastern Cape. European farmers also raided for labor north of the Orange River.
And then, from 1899 to 1902 … the Brits and the Boers went to war…
The Anglo-Boer War was a classic David-Goliath struggle, pitting two small Boer republics against the British Empire. These were the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek (the Transvaal, today Gauteng province) and the Orange Free State (now the Free State province). The war broke out on 11 October 1899, after the British government rejected a Boer ultimatum that all British soldiers be withdrawn from the Transvaal’s borders.
It was the culmination of a decades-long struggle between Afrikaner nationalism (and the ideal to be free and independent) and British imperialism. This was further fuelled by the discovery of rich goldfields in the Transvaal, and by the (in)famous empire-builder Cecil John Rhodes’s ideal of a British-controlled Africa from the Cape to Cairo.
About 450,000 white British soldiers (including volunteers from the colonies), and as many as 140,000 black and brown South African men on the side of the British, served in the war. They were pitted against not more than 79,000 Boers. This Boer force included about 2,500 foreign volunteers and several thousand white rebels from the Cape as well as a few hundred from the British colony of Natal (today KwaZulu-Natal province).
How did the war shape South Africa?
The war was supposed to be a white man’s war and a “gentleman’s war”, but from the start involved all race groups of the region. It degenerated into a total war and a precursor of many of the conflicts of the 1900s and beyond, such as the wars of liberation in the region. In some instances, it also showed characteristics of a civil war, especially in the Cape Colony, where some white colonials fought against white Cape rebels.
The war cast a shadow over South Africa and all its people. It is impossible to understand the history of the country without knowledge and insight of this far-reaching conflict.
After the Boers accepted the British terms of surrender on 31 May 1902, many Afrikaners strove to ensure that Afrikaner identity would not be jeopardised under British rule. The establishment of the Union of South Africa in 1910 brought the Boer and British colonies together under British authority. But it did not satisfy the expectations of Afrikaner nationalists. In 1914 Afrikaners founded the National Party.
Soon after the first world war broke out in 1914, an Afrikaner rebellion broke out, but was soon quelled. Staunch Afrikaner nationalists’ first aim was to ensure the future dominance of the Afrikaner. Once that was achieved, the focus shifted to ensure that white people in general would remain in power.
Thus the scene was set for the creation of apartheid. With it came a decades-long struggle between Afrikaner nationalism and black nationalism. To a large extent black nationalism was led by the African National Congress, established in 1912 in the wake of the Anglo-Boer War. Among other things this was because of promises of political rights, should black people support the British, that were not kept.
So yeah … the poor Afrkaaners, who are the literal group that formed the South African party that created apartheid, and who ruled Black South Africans for hundreds of years and stole 80 percent of their land, while extending the life of slavery so egregiously that Africans sided with the British in that country’s civil war, much the way enslaved Africans in America did in 1776.
Fast forward to the touching spectacle of Donald Trump, who upon resuming office, all-but shut down the State Department’s resettlement program for everyone other than white people; and who is currently cutting deals with a grab bag of apparently willing Global South regimes to whom he can sell actual Latino and Black refugees and asylum seekers, to stock those foreign prisons, rolling out the red carpet for Afrikaaner “refugees,” to save them from a made up “white genocide.”
From The Independent:
Since taking office, Donald Trump’s administration has virtually shut down refugee admissions and blocked funding for resettlement groups, stranding thousands of people who were granted entry to the United States for humanitarian protections only to have those offers rescinded.
But the president has singled out one specific group of people who will be allowed entry into the United States and appear to be on a fast track to citizenship: white South Africans.
A group of 59 white South Africans admitted to the United States as “refugees” have been “essentially extended citizenship,” Trump said on Monday.
The president claims white South Africans are victims of “genocide,” echoing a white supremacist conspiracy theory alleging immigration and forced assimilation threaten the existence of white people — a claim that has fueled racist hate and violence against minority groups as well as parallel conspiracy theories like the so-called “great replacement” theory.
Trump and his Republican allies have routinely amplified a bogus “great replacement” theory that claims Democratic officials are allowing immigrants into the country to manipulate elections. The idea is behind Trump’s anti-immigration agenda as well his executive orders and legislation in Congress taking aim at voter registration and election administration.
“When it comes to race and immigration issues, the Trump administration is about as subtle as an air raid,” America's Voice executive director Vanessa Cárdenas said in a statement to The Independent.
To review, Trump and his fellow ideologues, who also believe that the phrase “Black Lives Matter,” “Critical Race Theory” and “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” and that any college student who protests against Israel or describes what that country is doing militarily to Palestinians as a genocide, must be jailed or deported, believes there is in fact only one genocide taking place on earth: the fictional against white people in South Africa, which is playing out in vicious fashion inside the minds of Trump and his supporters. Mkay. Here’s the leader of the white victimhood fanfic squad himself:
VIDEO: Trump defends decision to welcome white South Africans as refugees:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob6rqfIKtpU
Associated Press
May 12, 2025
#trump #southafrica #news
President Donald Trump is defending his decision to welcome a small group of white South Africans as refugees, saying they face ‘genocide’ at home, after his administration suspended the refugee resettlement program on its first day in office, stranding thousands.
Read more: https://bit.ly/3EPDjw9 #trump #southafrica #news https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob6rqfIKtpU
It’s giving Tuckums, who also claims that his empathy for white South African farmers has nothing to do with race … but then again, don’t white people need a homeland???
VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_G5PL3B3lHA
White Persecution in South Africa Is Real (sez Tucker Carlson)
Tucker Carlson
March 3, 2025
#tuckercarlson #conservative #republican
Full interview here: https://tuckercarlson.com
And here are the facts:
Violence against white farmers is not particularly widespread even by the admission of organizations led by Afrikaaners dedicated to tracking farm attacks in South Africa, which suffers from a high rate of violent crime in general. White farmers own about 70 percent of commercial farmland in the country, despite making up a minority of the population. Fewer than 150 attacks involving farmers occurred during the entirety of 2023, according to the Afrikaaner political group AfriForum.
Numerous news reports and studies have found that despite a recent law being passed allowing the government to seize land in some cases without compensation, those land seizures have not actually taken place. AfriForum has vowed a legal fight in the country’s court system if that program were to begin, but even advocates for Afrikaaners have tempered their allegations and rhetoric beyond what the US president displayed on Monday.
Trump would insist on Monday that US media would cover the situation in South Africa more were the racial demographics reversed and a white majority was allegedly persecuting a Black minority.
The fact that Trump exhibits what sure looks like a white persecution complex should surprise no one. He has a long history of complaining that Americans (with the “white” implied) are being victimized by Native Americans who got casinos as reparations, Japanese automakers who sold better, cheaper cars to U.S. consumers, China, Haitian and African immigrants, whom he described as coming from “shithole” (meaning Black) countries. He has described nonwhite immigrants including Haitians as pet eaters and cannibals and he and his freak patrol of an administration claim that nonwhite migrants are “invading” the U.S. through the Southern border. He seems to have a negative obsession with America’s first Black president, Barack Obama, whom he seems to believe got a Nobel Peace Prize, praise and Hollywood love, when Trump has gotten none of the above because Obama is Black and he is white. He is quick to believe that any Black or brown man or teenage boy is a rapist — which is ironic as hell, given that he was found liable for sexually abusing E Jean Carroll and defaming her, and there are nearly two dozen other women who accuse him of being a sex pest. (The former “Central Park Five” AKA the Exonerated Five are suing him for defamation.) Trump routinely uses racist language about nonwhite immigrants — implying they are “impure,” possess faulty genes, and are not even quite human. No wonder he loves the 19th century so much. He talks like an old timey race scientist…
This is a man who seems willing to believe almost any violent conspiracy theory about nonwhite people, and every persecution fable about any white person, anywhere on earth. And his refugee policy is playing out, accordingly.
That’s not wearing well with everyone, however.
The Episcopal Church is ending its refugee resettlement partnership with the federal government over the Trump administration’s “preferential treatment” of white South Africans whom Donald Trump has baselessly claimed have been targeted by “genocide.”
Presiding Episcopal Bishop Sean Rowe announced Monday in a statement that the church was calling it quits on a joint program with the federal government, shortly before 59 South Africans arrived at Dulles International Airport outside Washington on a taxpayer-funded charter flight and were warmly greeted by a Trump administration State Department delegation.
“In light of our church’s steadfast commitment to racial justice and reconciliation and our historic ties with the Anglican Church of Southern Africa, we are not able to take this step” of helping the white South Africa immigrants, Rowe wrote.
“Accordingly, we have determined that, by the end of the federal fiscal year, we will conclude our refugee resettlement grant agreements with the U.S. federal government.”
It has been “painful to watch one group of refugees, selected in a highly unusual manner, receive preferential treatment over many others who have been waiting in refugee camps or dangerous conditions for years,” he wrote.
Rowe noted that the “previously bipartisan U.S. Refugee Admissions Program” in which the church was active has already “essentially shut down. Virtually no new refugees have arrived, hundreds of staff in resettlement agencies around the country have been laid off, and funding for resettling refugees who have already arrived has been uncertain,” he noted.
“As Christians, we must be guided not by political vagaries, but by the sure and certain knowledge that the kingdom of God is revealed to us in the struggles of those on the margins ... and we must follow that command. Right now, what that means is ending our participation in the federal government’s refugee resettlement program and investing our resources in serving migrants in other ways.”
White South Africans, descended from the largely Dutch Afrikaners who immigrated to South Africa centuries ago, long held an elevated status over native Black residents. The Afrikaners imposed the brutally discriminatory apartheid policies until they ended in 1990 that kept a small minority in control of the country, to the suffering and impoverishment of the Black majority.
To this day white farmers continue to own roughly 70 percent of commercial farmland in the country even though white South Africans make up only about 7 percent of the population.
Earlier this year Trump promised a “rapid” whites-only “pathway to citizenship” for the Afrikaners after he was reportedly pressed on the issue by tech billionaire and DOGE hatchet man Elon Musk, who was born and raised in apartheid South Africa.
You’ve almost got to hand it to him for staying on brand.
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Tucker Carlson
March 3, 2025
#tuckercarlson #conservative #republican
Full interview here: https://tuckercarlson.com
And here are the facts:
Violence against white farmers is not particularly widespread even by the admission of organizations led by Afrikaaners dedicated to tracking farm attacks in South Africa, which suffers from a high rate of violent crime in general. White farmers own about 70 percent of commercial farmland in the country, despite making up a minority of the population. Fewer than 150 attacks involving farmers occurred during the entirety of 2023, according to the Afrikaaner political group AfriForum.
Numerous news reports and studies have found that despite a recent law being passed allowing the government to seize land in some cases without compensation, those land seizures have not actually taken place. AfriForum has vowed a legal fight in the country’s court system if that program were to begin, but even advocates for Afrikaaners have tempered their allegations and rhetoric beyond what the US president displayed on Monday.
Trump would insist on Monday that US media would cover the situation in South Africa more were the racial demographics reversed and a white majority was allegedly persecuting a Black minority.
The fact that Trump exhibits what sure looks like a white persecution complex should surprise no one. He has a long history of complaining that Americans (with the “white” implied) are being victimized by Native Americans who got casinos as reparations, Japanese automakers who sold better, cheaper cars to U.S. consumers, China, Haitian and African immigrants, whom he described as coming from “shithole” (meaning Black) countries. He has described nonwhite immigrants including Haitians as pet eaters and cannibals and he and his freak patrol of an administration claim that nonwhite migrants are “invading” the U.S. through the Southern border. He seems to have a negative obsession with America’s first Black president, Barack Obama, whom he seems to believe got a Nobel Peace Prize, praise and Hollywood love, when Trump has gotten none of the above because Obama is Black and he is white. He is quick to believe that any Black or brown man or teenage boy is a rapist — which is ironic as hell, given that he was found liable for sexually abusing E Jean Carroll and defaming her, and there are nearly two dozen other women who accuse him of being a sex pest. (The former “Central Park Five” AKA the Exonerated Five are suing him for defamation.) Trump routinely uses racist language about nonwhite immigrants — implying they are “impure,” possess faulty genes, and are not even quite human. No wonder he loves the 19th century so much. He talks like an old timey race scientist…
This is a man who seems willing to believe almost any violent conspiracy theory about nonwhite people, and every persecution fable about any white person, anywhere on earth. And his refugee policy is playing out, accordingly.
That’s not wearing well with everyone, however.
The Episcopal Church is ending its refugee resettlement partnership with the federal government over the Trump administration’s “preferential treatment” of white South Africans whom Donald Trump has baselessly claimed have been targeted by “genocide.”
Presiding Episcopal Bishop Sean Rowe announced Monday in a statement that the church was calling it quits on a joint program with the federal government, shortly before 59 South Africans arrived at Dulles International Airport outside Washington on a taxpayer-funded charter flight and were warmly greeted by a Trump administration State Department delegation.
“In light of our church’s steadfast commitment to racial justice and reconciliation and our historic ties with the Anglican Church of Southern Africa, we are not able to take this step” of helping the white South Africa immigrants, Rowe wrote.
“Accordingly, we have determined that, by the end of the federal fiscal year, we will conclude our refugee resettlement grant agreements with the U.S. federal government.”
It has been “painful to watch one group of refugees, selected in a highly unusual manner, receive preferential treatment over many others who have been waiting in refugee camps or dangerous conditions for years,” he wrote.
Rowe noted that the “previously bipartisan U.S. Refugee Admissions Program” in which the church was active has already “essentially shut down. Virtually no new refugees have arrived, hundreds of staff in resettlement agencies around the country have been laid off, and funding for resettling refugees who have already arrived has been uncertain,” he noted.
“As Christians, we must be guided not by political vagaries, but by the sure and certain knowledge that the kingdom of God is revealed to us in the struggles of those on the margins ... and we must follow that command. Right now, what that means is ending our participation in the federal government’s refugee resettlement program and investing our resources in serving migrants in other ways.”
White South Africans, descended from the largely Dutch Afrikaners who immigrated to South Africa centuries ago, long held an elevated status over native Black residents. The Afrikaners imposed the brutally discriminatory apartheid policies until they ended in 1990 that kept a small minority in control of the country, to the suffering and impoverishment of the Black majority.
To this day white farmers continue to own roughly 70 percent of commercial farmland in the country even though white South Africans make up only about 7 percent of the population.
Earlier this year Trump promised a “rapid” whites-only “pathway to citizenship” for the Afrikaners after he was reportedly pressed on the issue by tech billionaire and DOGE hatchet man Elon Musk, who was born and raised in apartheid South Africa.
You’ve almost got to hand it to him for staying on brand.
[Thanks for reading Joy's House! This post is public so feel free to share it.
Joy's House is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.]
