Diplomacy has rules.
No matter how serious the subject matter, the negotiators are expected to be cordial, respectful, no matter what they may privately think of the person or persons sitting on the other side of the table.
When a diplomat lets the mask slip for a moment, and calls out the opposition for cheating, for duplicity, even for atrocities, our sympathy is expected to lie with the person being exposed, because we simply weren’t supposed to mention those crimes against humanity out loud while the perpetrator was in the room.
Even if they’re true.
One is reminded of Dustin Hoffman in the classic Peter Pan retelling, “Hook,” in which the mustachioed little villain enforces Master Jack’s rules, saying “Bad Form” when the rules are violated.
…Which brings us back to the real world, on May 21, 2025, when Cyril Ramaphosa, the president of South Africa, visited the White House, presumably hoping for some foreign aid, having heard about how the waste and abuse of foreign aid is rather frowned upon in the White House these days.
Perhaps President Ramaphosa hoped to win his case with a charm offensive.
The South African government is in the red, having grown accustomed to hundreds of millions of dollars in gifts from the United States.
Why, one might ask, would any government build an expectation of foreign gifts into its budgeting? Surely any government must know that a gift is something to appreciate in the moment, but not to count on for the future. But America has built a reputation of foolish generosity, and apparently, many foreigners are surprised to learn that President Trump, Secretary Rubio, and DOGE are indeed serious about stopping the bleeding once and for all.
There was a time, well within the lifetime of half our country in fact, when South Africa was the strongest economy in the continent. South Africa has a very mixed population, settled by Dutch and English colonists, who built a paradise in one of the most beautiful countries on earth – a paradise that attracted immigrants from other African lands and from other continents as well.
By the modern era, South Africa was walking a difficult tightrope, with a gradually strengthening economy, slowly building opportunity for all its people on the one hand, and a terribly polarized society on the other, with the Dutch and the English (the Afrikaners), the Bantu and other southern African tribes (such as the Zulus) and the Coloureds (the South African term for everyone who didn’t fit in those groups, either by being mixed-race or being from elsewhere, such as Asians and Middle Easterners) all acting and thinking along ethnic lines, ever more wary of each other.
The Dutch had built a nation there, then the English had improved and modernized it; now there were marxist Bantus who just felt it should be their turn. In the 1980s, the deeply communist terrorist organization known as the African National Congress (ANC) made use of global PR to turn world opinion against the apartheid government of the Afrikaners, and to join so many other African nations in marxist revolution.
Many other African nations had done the same thing in the preceding decades, throwing off European colonial governments and imposing the central planning of a Stalinist-Brezhnevian bent. Had they cared about their people, they certainly had enough evidence from the experiences of other post-colonial African nations that it was a direction to be avoided.
But they had no interest in the good of their people, and the ANC championed such terrorists and homicidal maniacs as Nelson and Winnie Mandela, and Oliver Tambo, forcing these vicious characters on the world until they managed to take power. Even as the former Soviet Union and the former captive nations of Eastern Europe were throwing off the yoke of Marxism, South Africa joyfully put it on.
For thirty years now, the government of South Africa has been firmly in the hands of these Marxists, replacing the sin of apartheid with an anti-white legal system that makes apartheid look mild by comparison. Theft of land, theft of property, even physical attacks are all welcome in South Africa today, as long as the crime is committed against an Afrikaner.
As was to be expected, the economy of South Africa quickly fell from being the jewel of the continent to its shame. Having once been a nation on the rise, its fall has been that much more tragic to watch.
Of all the nations in Africa, this one should be the last to come to Washington DC, hat in hand, begging for handouts. But that’s what the politics of envy and hatred get you.
When South Africa’s president arrived at the White House, he expected an exchange of pleasantries, a fat check, and cordial silence about the facts on the ground in South Africa.
President Ramaphosa didn’t expect President Trump to call him out on his government’s endorsement of such measures as the widespread theft of private property and even physical attacks on innocent families.
So he denied it.
President Trump was ready for that denial.
President Trump directed the lights to be shut off and a monitor to be switched on, and to the shock of reporters and politicians alike who had never seen such a thing before, President Trump forced the room to watch as President Ramaphosa and his fellow South African politicians clearly agitated for theft, called for the taking of private farms, and even riled up their audiences to murder their fellow South Africans.
The press reports a fact-check; “there’s not really any genocide going on.” But what did President Ramaphosa and his allies call for? Their message is to “kill the white farmer and take their land.” There may be many ways to define a genocide; we can quibble about whether the numbers rise to that definition.
But there is no more denying that thousands of white farmers have been murdered by the ANC’s goons in these land grabs; President Trump showed video of the cemeteries. There is no more denying that the President Ramaphosa’s own party calls for mass murder; President Trump showed the speeches by ANC politicians, and forced the room to listen to that audio. “At some point there must be killing,” shouted the TV monitor, “because killing is part of the revolution!”
You could feel the political establishment collapse in shock.
This just isn’t done.
You don’t call out the corrupt leader of a corrupt party for his party’s atrocities. It’s not allowed. To the traditionalists of Foggy Bottom, this is the ultimate in “Bad Form.”
But President Trump did it, and frankly, it’s high time someone did.
There are corrupt people in politics all over the world; there are criminals embezzling from public funds and wiretapping their enemies, politicians taking bribes and otherwise abusing their offices. There always have been, and there always will be. We are a fallen race, living in a fallen world.
But we expect such crimes to still be illegal; we expect them to be prosecuted. And we certainly don’t expect politicians to chant their desire to commit crimes out loud, as official, proud public policy, whipping up the support of crowds of greedy and bloodthirsty brownshirts.
In South Africa, the ANC has made it clear for thirty years: they have the Stalinist inclination to confiscate, rape, torture and kill, and they aren’t even interested in being quiet about the fact, because they are just that confident that the rest of the world will never call them out on it.
President Trump didn’t share some secret wiretapped conversations among party leaders in the cigar-smoke-filled-rooms of ANC headquarters. The tapes he screened were of public meetings, even televised outdoor public speeches by politicians who know they can advocate mass murder with impunity in South Africa, videos that showed hundreds or even thousands of supporters cheering and dancing to the gleeful advocacy of confiscation and murder.
This is information that only a small segment of the American people have known about for years, information that our mainstream media has purposefully kept out of the news. The press built a fiction that Nelson Mandela and his allies were sweet and peaceful souls, and they have no interest in exposing themselves as having run cover for a genocidal bunch of marxist bigots for over forty years.
President Trump hasn’t just exposed President Ramaphosa and the ANC; he has exposed the press for their silence. He has exposed the American Democratic Party, which championed the cause of these demonic radicals ever since the 1980s. And he has exposed the traditional foreign policy establishment, not just of the United States but of the West in general, for so many decades of silence on these matters.
President Trump performed a public service here that was likely unprecedented. Calling out a foreign leader for his lies, his abuse, and his party’s official tyranny is simply not done. But it ought to be.
If the American people are going to offer foreign aid, we do deserve to know what kind of leaders we’re giving our money to.
If the American people are going to set up a foreign leader or his movement as noble, we do deserve to know if their real behavior is as sweet and pure as they’ve been presented.
And if the American people are ever going to fully appreciate what we have here in the United States, in our system and our standing in the world, we do need to fully understand the other countries out there, so that perhaps we can again remember that we do stand apart, that America stands out, that this nation is indeed special, a role model to emulate, not just another piggy bank for the avaricious pols of the third world to plunder.
President Trump has, once again, stood out, beyond party, beyond position, and shown the world an important truth that had too long been hidden.
Copyright 2025 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance trainer and consultant. President of the Ethnic American Council in the 1980s and Chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party in the 1990s, his book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his political satires on the Biden-Harris administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), and his first nonfiction book, “Current Events and the Issues of Our Age,” are all available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.
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