JOHANNESBURG — President Donald Trump is scheduled to meet South African President Cyril Ramaphosa at the White House on Wednesday for a make-or-break session, despite new accusations from the president this past Friday that South Africa is “out of control” and committing genocide.
Speaking on Air Force One as it returned from the Persian Gulf region, Trump repeated his claim that white Afrikaner South African farmers are being slaughtered and forced off their land. The Afrikaners are descendants of mostly Dutch settlers who first arrived in South Africa in 1652.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio elaborated on these claims Sunday on CBS, saying “all evidence [indicates] the farmers in South Africa are being treated brutally.”
Some 50 Afrikaners were flown to the U.S. as refugees last week. Rubio said there’s “more to come”. South Africa, and its president, denies claims of genocide and harassment.
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Could the Oval Office and the Wednesday meeting be the setting for a Zelenskyy-style dressing down of the South African president? In February, Ukraine’s president was involved in a shouting match with Trump and others, which reportedly led to him being ejected from the White House.
“The meeting is set to occur at a time when the relationship between the two countries has soured to unprecedented lows,” analyst Frans Cronje, Yorktown Foundation for Freedom advisory board member, told Fox News Digital.
South Africa is “hosting Hamas and Hezbollah, doing business with Iran’s IRGC, prosecuting Israel at the ICJ and cozying up to Beijing and Moscow. These choices have consequences,” Max Meizlish, senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told Fox News Digital.
Meizlish said South Africa has “attracted the ire of the president and key members of Congress, who play significant roles in shaping the future of U.S.-South African relations. Unfortunately, President Ramaphosa and his colleagues in the ANC do not appear to fully appreciate this fact. President Trump should insist on meaningful change and be ready to back his demands up with tools like targeted sanctions and tariffs.”
But will the White House meeting be icy, feisty, even loud? Not from the South African side, former U.S. diplomat and Daily Maverick Associate Editor J. Brooks Spector told Fox News Digital. “Ramaphosa has a long track record of careful negotiating with adversaries.”
“He doesn’t raise his voice, even when others become heated. I’ve seen this firsthand. In a smoke-filled room in 1990 in South Africa’s dusty Free State, I watched Ramaphosa, then a leader of a black miners’ union, sometimes even smile as he quietly and successfully calmed down [the] often-shouting white miners accused of killing black colleagues underground and got the murders stopped.”
Spector continued, “It is almost certain Ramaphosa and his team have closely studied the way three recent prior meetings with Trump have gone – those with Zelenskyy (Ukraine), Starmer (the United Kingdom) and Carney (Canada) – in an effort to draw lessons about how to present their best face. He will not make neophyte negotiation mistakes.”
Cronje told Fox News Digital that Ramaphosa and his country badly need the U.S.
“At home, Mr Ramaphosa is presiding over economic stagnation, with South Africa facing a rate of economic growth estimated at just over 1% together with an unemployment rate of over 30%. Mr. Ramaphosa will, therefore, be under great pressure to secure a deal.”
Some 600 U.S. companies operate in South Africa. Ramaphosa has taken four top ministers to Washington hoping to offer new deals, especially reportedly on natural gas, minerals and agricultural product sales to the U.S., and possibly finally the licensing of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet system in South Africa.
Cronje noted a military perspective the U.S. will also want to consider: “South Africa commands the southern sea route between the Indian and Atlantic oceans, which is an important trade and naval choke point.”
Meizlish added that South Africa “holds vast mineral wealth and could anchor U.S. investment in Africa, but that doesn’t mean we should turn a blind eye to its alignment with America’s enemies.”
South Africa’s chief rabbi, Dr. Warren Goldstein, told Fox News Digital that South Africa could “easily withdraw” its ICJ case against Israel if it wanted to, adding that “opinion polls show that there is very little domestic support for his (Ramaphosa’s) anti-Israel stance, with most holding positive views towards Israel, sharing the same conservative Christian values that deeply resonate with Mr. Trump’s support base in the U.S.”
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Meizlish said, “This visit can’t be about optics or deals that fail to address the root of South Africa’s malign foreign policy. Trump needs to push Ramaphosa to make substantive, structural reforms in his country’s foreign policy while also creating pathways for greater U.S. investment. It can’t just be one or the other.”
As South African politicians swept through Washington on Tuesday on a major lobbying exercise, trying to get traction on the idea of focusing on trade, Rubio told senators during a hearing that a reset in relations might be possible.
“If there’s a willingness on their side to reset relations, obviously [that’s] something we’ll explore, but we do so with eyes wide open to what they’ve done so far,” he said.
Fox News Digital reached out to the South African government for comment but received no response.
