Donald Trump has warned South Africa not to issue a formal G20 joint statement after this weekend’s summit, to which the obvious response is: quiet, piggy.
According to the US, any joint statement implying consensus and the successful completion of a full G20 hangout would be illegitimate given the US boycott.
Then again, the president of that country also insists that the Gulf of Mexico is the Gulf of America, that anti-fascists are terrorists, that some Nazis are very fine people, that you can grab women by the pussy, that Saudi journalist Jamal Kashoggi was murdered and cut up because “things happen”, that the Epstein files are a Democrat hoax, that they’re eating the dogs and the cats, and that the worst polling figures in his career are the best.
In other words, the pronouncements of the current US regime are not worth the toilet paper they’re smeared on.
Exhibit A in the local context, of course, is Trump’s lie, repeated this week in even more dramatic language than before, that South Africa’s government is carrying out a campaign of bloody persecution against farmers, specifically Afrikaners.
A million Afrikaners could line up, put their hands on the Bible and swear to Trump one by one that there is no violent persecution of white people in South Africa, and Maga would denounce every single one of them as a liar.
On Tuesday, during a meeting with Saudi supremo Mohammed Bin Salman (who the US concluded in 2021 had ordered Kashoggi butchered), Trump said: “I am not going to South Africa for the G20 because I think their policies on the extermination of people are unacceptable. So I am not going. So I won’t refer to anything having to do with South Africa. South Africa has behaved extremely badly.”
It goes without saying that this is libel on an international scale. ANC governments have exterminated many things in South Africa — political accountability, public transport, the livelihoods of millions of citizens — but they have never deliberately set out to make the lives of one particular demographic miserable based on their race. That was the Nats.
Still, this particular lie serves Trump well. The Maga movement, like other white Christian nationalist movements, is fuelled by grievance, specifically the delusional but deep-rooted belief that white people are the victims of giant, shadowy scheme to persecute them and ultimately replace them.
Afrikaner groups in South Africa have been peculiarly reluctant to denounce and refute Trump’s lie en masse, but even if they did it wouldn’t change much: one of the geniuses of cults is that they convince their followers that any fact or piece of evidence from outside the cult is, by definition, a devilish lie designed to destroy them.
A million Afrikaners could line up, put their hands on the Bible and swear to Trump one by one that there is no violent persecution of white people in South Africa, and Maga would denounce every single one of them as a liar.
It’s all so terribly transparent and infantile, and yet what can’t be dismissed with a laugh or a sigh is the fact that this particular cult, stuffed to the brim with both genuine fanatics and supremely cynical hustlers, is also the richest country in the world as well as the most heavily-armed and aggressive. And in the hands of a weak, ignorant bully, it is incredibly dangerous.
It’s nice to imagine Cyril Ramaphosa or like-minded members of the G20 telling Trump where to shove his demand, ordering him to be ‘quiet, piggy’ with the same contempt he showed for Bloomberg journalist Catherine Lucey this week.
But in the real world, where nuclear-armed bullies with fantastically thin skins invent reasons to harm the countries that offend them, perhaps the safest move is to smile, nod and hope that some deployed Maga cadre has slipped up and not redacted the name of every pig from the Epstein files …
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