Trump Makes Carveout in Refugee Ban—for White South Africans

The Trump administration is treating Afrikaners, white descendants of mainly Dutch colonizers in South Africa, as “refugees” and plans to bring them to the United States next week, according to The New York Times.

Trump is even planning on a welcome delegation of government officials to greet the first 54 people as they arrive at Dulles Airport near Washington, D.C., on Monday.

The 54 Afrikaners were given priority status, meaning they waited no more than three months for their resettlement. Many refugees from other countries are forced to wait 18 to 24 months, and sometimes even years, for their resettlement assignment. This comes as Trump banned virtually all other refugees on his first day in office.

“We are profoundly disturbed that the administration has slammed the door in the face of thousands of other refugees approved by D.H.S. months ago, notwithstanding courts ordering the White House to let many of them in,” Mark Hetfield, president of a Jewish resettlement organization, told the Times. “That’s just not right.”

Afrikaners in South Africa claim that they are being racially discriminated against, that they can’t get jobs and don’t feel safe with the current government and its progressive, redistributive policies. The South African government currently has a program that allows it to seize land from Afrikaners without providing compensation—the very same thing white colonizers did when they arrived, forcing Black South Africans from their land for nothing and relegating them to second- and even third-class citizenship.

Some feel as if the Afrikaners are simply using the reversal of the apartheid-era systems that they’ve benefited from for generations as justification for their resettlement in the U.S., casting themselves as victims in a situation where they’ve historically been the victimizers.

“Historically, in fact, farmers have been quite oppressed in South Africa, but those are Black farmers. Those are the people whose land was alienated over centuries of colonization and who, in many cases, worked as really poorly remunerated menial laborers in horrific conditions on white-owned farms,” said Yale professor Daniel Magaziner. “And so in many ways, what [Trump is] doing is he is implicitly, not explicitly, but implicitly downplaying the reality of South African history.”

“You do have the reality that a lot of Black South Africans are still without any wealth, are still in very deep poverty and saying, hey, since the end of apartheid, those scales have not been equaled,” said John Eligon, The New York Times’ Johannesburg bureau chief.

Some on the Black South African left have a sharper view of the situation.

“Due to global and local economic processes, the rich continue to get richer, and the poor get poorer. Most of the white—of the farmland, more than 70 percent of it is owned by white farmers. So, basically, they are sitting pretty,” said activist Trevor Nganwe. “You know, there’s a saying, ‘The guilty are afraid.’ Perhaps they know that this unjust situation, where a tiny minority enjoys most of the country’s wealth and resources, is not tenable, and sooner or later, it will have to end.”

The influence of Elon Musk, who grew up under the benefits of apartheid in South Africa, cannot be understated. In March, he replied “absolutely!” to a post that incorrectly claimed that white Afrikaners are facing genocide—a deeply ironic statement given the historical context of the country.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is lying about the qualifications of his pick for surgeon general.

During an appearance on Fox News Thursday night, Kennedy attempted to defend his choice of Casey Means, a wellness influencer and author who has no active medical license and never completed her physician residency. But, as is typical for the anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist, in lieu of evidence, Kennedy just made stuff up.

“She was the top of her med—the very top of her medical class at Stanford,” Kennedy said.

“She is in every—during her residency, she won every award that she could win. She walked away from traditional medicine because she was not curing patients. She couldn’t get anybody within her profession to look at the nutrition contributions to illness,” Kennedy said.

But it would’ve been impossible for Means to be at the top of her class at the Stanford School of Medicine, because students aren’t actually ranked there. A spokesperson from the school told CNN’s Daniel Dale that medical students are graded on a pass-fail system.

Kennedy’s claim that Means quit her residency to walk away from traditional medicine is also untrue.

Dr. Paul Flint, a former chair of otolaryngology/head and neck surgery at Oregon Health and Science University, who helped oversee Means during her five-year residency program, provided a completely different explanation for why she had walked away from it after four and a half years.

“She wasn’t even sure she wanted to be in medicine. She wanted to do something different. She wanted to resign,” Flint told the Los Angeles Times.

Means was under so much anxiety that she was given three months paid time off. “She did that, came back and decided she wanted to leave the program. She did not like that level of stress,” Flint said.

Flint said there was “a lot of anxiety around” being a surgeon. “You become much more responsible the more senior you get,” he explained. Now Means may become the surgeon general, the highest-ranking doctor in the country. Or in her case, the highest ranking non-practicing “doctor.”

Kennedy argued in a post on X Thursday that Means’s lack of qualifications were exactly what made her such a great fit with his Make America Healthy Again agenda. No, seriously.

“The attacks that Casey is unqualified because she left the medical system completely miss the point of what we are trying to accomplish with MAHA. Casey is the perfect choice for Surgeon General precisely because she left the traditional medical system—not in spite of it,” he wrote.

Donald Trump has decided to appoint one of his favorite Fox News hosts, Jeanine Pirro, as interim U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., and she has quite a history.

Pirro has spent the last two decades with the conservative TV network as a legal analyst and host of the weekend show Justice With Judge Jeanine, and later co-host of The Five. During that time, she has shared some outrageous statements and views, including election denialism.

During Trump’s first term, Pirro said that the FBI and Justice Department were full “of individuals who should not just be fired but who need to be taken out in handcuffs.” She has not held back in sycophantic praise of the president, calling Trump “a nonstop, never-give-up, no-holds-barred human version of the speed of light.” Pirro also spoke onstage at a campaign rally for Trump, seemingly violating network policy (without getting punished).

On MSNBC Thursday night, Chris Hayes aired a montage of some of Pirro’s craziest takes, including how she’d make a deal with the devil to get opposition research on an opponent.

Pirro is only getting the job because Trump’s previous pick, Ed Martin, faced too much Republican opposition in the Senate over his connections to the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot, as well as his own election denialism. Martin also used his brief time as acting U.S. attorney to make legal threats against everyone from Georgetown University to Democratic members of Congress.

What will Pirro do as the top federal prosecutor in the nation’s Capitol? Her rhetoric as a TV host rivals Martin’s insane background, and it remains to be seen how she’ll handle the position—or even if the Senate decides to confirm her at all.

Trump is lowering his tariffs on China before he even sits down at the negotiating table.

“CHINA SHOULD OPEN UP ITS MARKET TO USA — WOULD BE SO GOOD FOR THEM!!!” he posted on Truth Social Friday morning. “CLOSED MARKETS DON’T WORK ANYMORE!!!”

“80% Tariff on China seems right! Up to Scott B.,” he posted just minutes later, referring to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

Eighty percent tariffs is still a humongous number for taxes on imports, but it is a significant decrease from Trump’s current 145 percent tariffs on the country.

The unprompted concession suggests that Trump does not have as much leverage with China—which accounts for $143.5 billion in U.S. exports and $438.9 billion in U.S. imports—as he thinks he does. Or at least he doesn’t have as much leverage as he wants us to think he does.

Bessent and U.S. trade representative Jameson Greer are set to meet with Chinese officials in Switzerland this weekend to discuss a potential trade deal.

Vice President JD Vance has his own particularly bad explanation for Donald Trump’s already ridiculous way of dismissing the rising prices of consumer goods.

In an interview on Fox News Thursday, host Martha MacCallum asked Vance what he thought about the president’s strange warning that American children might need to only have two dolls, instead of 30, in the face of his sweeping reciprocal tariff policy.

“Do you tell the people of this country that you need to make some sacrifices in order to reorganize this bad trade relationship?” MacCallum asked.

“Well, I think the president’s point here is that yeah, we do need to become more self-reliant, and that’s not gonna happen overnight, and it’s not always gonna be easy, Martha,” Vance replied.

“But what I’d ask people is not whether they want two dolls, or five dolls, or 20 dolls for their kids, I’d ask American moms and dads, ‘Would you like to be able to go into a pharmacy and know that the drugs your kids need are actually available to you as an American parent?’” Vance continued.

“Would you like to—God forbid—if your country goes to a war, and your son or daughter are sent off to fight, would you like to know that the weapons that they have are good American-made stuff, not made by a foreign adversary?” he said.

But Vance’s weird pivot to fearmongering about war legitimately makes no sense. America is already the world’s largest arms exporter, accounting for a whopping 43 percent of global weapons exports between 2020 and 2024, according to CNN. Trump’s past efforts to invest in weapons production benefited defense contractors more than soldiers.

As for Vance’s remark about pharmacies, it’s not evident that Trump’s tariffs will actually help increase access to drugs. Trump has said that he plans to make a decision on pharmaceutical tariffs within the next two weeks, but the Trump administration’s efforts to boost the domestic manufacturing of medicines may come at a cost to the people who need them, while U.S. manufacturing struggles to meet demand. Ahead of Trump’s announcement, imports of pharmaceuticals have seen a significant spike.

One by one, different members of the Trump administration have attempted to make sense of the president’s weird “dolls” comment. White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller argued that Trump wanted a higher degree of quality for American-made goods, while in the same breath promising that the president would strip the very regulations that ensure that quality in an effort to make production less expensive. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent insisted that a little pain now would lead little girls to a “better life,” while sidestepping concerns that economic damage Trump was threatening now could last generations.

President Trump’s acting FEMA chief was fired Thursday for apparently wanting the agency to continue functioning.

On Wednesday, Cameron Hamilton was asked at a congressional hearing what he thought about the Trump administration’s reported plans to get rid of the emergency management agency. His answer was probably the reason why he was axed.

“I do not believe it is in the best interests of the American people to eliminate the Federal Emergency Management Agency,” Hamilton said to members of Congress, adding that he wasn’t in a position to decide the agency’s future.

Trump has said on multiple occasions that he wants to get rid of FEMA, including days after he was sworn in as president while Los Angeles County was struggling to cope with massive wildfires.

“I like, frankly, the concept when North Carolina gets hit, the governor takes care of it. When Florida gets hit, the governor takes care of it. Meaning the state takes care of it,” Trump said at the time. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who is in charge of overseeing FEMA, has also called for eliminating FEMA.

“The president has indicated he wants to eliminate FEMA as it exists today, and to have states have more control over their emergency management response,” Noem said this week to Congress. “He wants to empower local governments and support them and how they respond to their people.”

The White House has already slashed funding for natural disaster recovery and preparedness, putting the country at serious risk. Hurricane season is only weeks away with the start of summer, and the southeastern U.S. is still recovering from Hurricanes Helene and Milton. The president’s budget proposal calls for cutting $646 million to FEMA.

The Trump administration is already trying to deny FEMA relief on a selective basis. The White House was found to have violated a court order by withholding FEMA relief to at least 19 states, all of whom have Democratic attorneys general. States that were particularly affected were those with immigration policies conflicting with Trump’s priorities.

Hamilton’s firing is a bad sign for the future of FEMA, and an even worse sign for disaster response in the U.S. The past few decades have seen some big government mistakes in disaster relief, notably Hurricane Katrina in 2005 in Louisiana and Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico during during Trump’s first term eight years ago. Now, we’re about to see what will happen after massive cuts to emergency disaster relief.

Within just a few hours of white smoke rising out of the Vatican, MAGA is already fuming over the new pope.

Cardinal Robert Prevost was elected the new leader of the Catholic Church Thursday, becoming the first American pontiff. But like any American, Pope Leo XIV seems to have his own opinions about President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance. (Spoiler alert: He doesn’t seem like a fan!)

Charlie Kirk, the Christian nationalist founder of Turning Point USA, started out backing Prevost’s selection, pointing to his apparent Republican voting record, but seemed to descend into doubt.

In a video posted to X, Kirk initially appeared nonplussed as he aired his concerns about Pope Leo’s “not-so-great tweets.” The right-wing fanatic was referring to several old reposts by an X account associated with the name Robert Prevost, which has been confirmed as belonging to the new pope. 

Kirk mused that perhaps an American pope had been selected because “they want a voice that is also for the opening of American borders while we have President Trump!”

“God Save the Church,” Jack Posobiec, the pitiable MAGA activist covering the papal conclave for The Charlie Kirk Show, wrote in a post on X.

The “End Wokeness” account on X posted screenshots of reposts from Prevost’s account, including posts that criticized Trump’s first-term immigration polices, one that advocated for gun reform, and another that advocated to “end racism in our hearts and in society,” in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.

While Kirk seemed less certain about what exactly Pope Leo’s appointment meant for the future, far-right internet troll Laura Loomer was decidedly more … decided. “Just another Marxist puppet in the Vatican,” she wrote in a post on X. “Catholics don’t have anything good to look forward to.”

Loomer spread her vitriol across several posts about the new pope’s supposed online activity. “The new Pope once retweeted a post about how we need to keep praying for career criminal & drug addict George Floyd,” she wrote in another post. “The tweet said, ‘May all hatred, violence and prejudice be eradicated.’ What prejudice? Is that another way to spell FENTANYL OVERDOSE? MARXIST POPE!”

In another post, she simply wrote, “WOKE MARXIST POPE.”

This is the same woman who met with the president last month to advise that he oust multiple staffers on his National Security Council—and he did.  

Other MAGA voices weren’t quite as disturbed—even the really far-right ones. Ryan Girdusky, a political consultant who previously wrote for notorious neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, counseled caution, in a post on X. 

“Trying to fit the ideology of the Pope in the context of American politics is a fruitless endeavor,” he wrote. “If you’re Catholic, pray that he’s a good steward of the Church and defends the throne of Christ as the successor of Peter.”

This story has been updated.

The Trump administration’s plan to deport immigrants to Libya was even more extensive and disturbing than initial reports suggested.

Under the plan, nationals from countries including Cambodia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and even Mexico were to be sent to the north African country still recovering from a civil war. According to court filings from immigration rights advocates, who filed an emergency request in Boston federal court to halt the deportations, ICE gathered one Vietnamese national, one Laotian, and four other detainees and demanded they sign paperwork agreeing to be sent to Libya.

When all six refused, they were handcuffed and placed into solitary confinement. Later on Wednesday, U.S. District Court Judge Brian Murphy ruled that any deportations to Libya of third-country nationals without the opportunity to object over torture concerns “would violate this Court’s Order.”

Libya’s two rival governments each denied on Wednesday that they had agreed to accept deported immigrants from the U.S. When asked about the plan Wednesday, Trump himself said, “I don’t know. You’ll have to ask the Department of Homeland Security.”

The idea that immigrants in the U.S. could be deported to a country like Libya, where “open slave markets” exist and where immigrants are detained in conditions described as a “hellscape” by Amnesty International, is shocking in itself. Even more shocking is that neither of the two entities who control Libya even agreed to accepting any immigrants from the U.S.

But the Trump administration has already taken an unprecedented step in sending immigrants to countries to which they have no connection, such as El Salvador and Rwanda. While a court order appears to have at least put a temporary brake on deportations to Libya, the White House will probably keep trying to skirt the law in trying to expel as many immigrants as possible.

When white smoke began pouring from the Sistine Chapel’s chimney Thursday, after as few as four ballots, many assumed that meant the sitting Catholic cardinals had selected the consensus front-runner Pietro Parolin, who had served as Pope Francis’s secretary of state since 2013, as the new pope. If there’s one thing you have to hand to the assembled leaders of the Catholic Church, it’s this: They do know how to surprise you. 

When the curtains of a balcony on St. Peter’s Basilica were drawn an hour later, Parolin did emerge—to announce that Robert Francis Prevost had been elected pope. Few had thought that the Chicago-born Prevost—now known as Pope Leo XIV—was a contender. But there he was: the first American pope in the history of the Catholic Church. 

Prevost, like Parolin, was a close ally of Francis. Ordained in 1982, he has spent much of his time in Peru and was appointed by Francis as bishop of Chiclayo in 2014. In 2023, he was appointed to the influential position of prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops. As with Parolin, Prevost is seen as a continuity pick, given his close ties to his predecessor. 

In his opening speech, the newly anointed Pope Leo XIV paid tribute to Francis, who had last been seen speaking on the same balcony shortly before Easter. “Let us keep in our ears the weak voice of Pope Francis that blesses Rome,” Leo XIV said. 

“The pope who blessed Rome, gave his blessing to the entire world that morning of Easter. Allow me to follow up on that blessing. God loves us. God loves everyone. Evil will not prevail,” he said in Italian as he addressed a massive, multinational crowd of more than 100,000 people. 

Prevost is seen as being to Francis’s right on LGBTQ issues. In 2013, shortly after assuming the papacy, Francis expressed openness toward gay parishioners, saying, “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” Prevost, meanwhile, has been critical of what he has called the “homosexual lifestyle” and culture, which encourages “sympathy for beliefs and practices that are at odds with the Gospel.” 

Like Francis, he is deeply critical of “gender ideology,” which he has said “seeks to create genders that do not exist.” Prevost’s record on what is arguably the single biggest issue in the church—rampant sexual abuse by clergy—is troubling. He not only provided housing to a priest who had been accused of abuse but provided him a residence that was near a Catholic school.  

He is, nevertheless, considerably more moderate on social issues than many other contenders. Like Francis, he is outspoken about the danger posed by climate change and the need to provide ministry, support, and sympathy to migrants and the poor. Last year, in an interview with the Vatican’s news outlet, he distilled his vision of the church, which is one in which leaders are constantly in communion with the poor. 

“The bishop is not supposed to be a little prince sitting in his kingdom,” he said, but is “called authentically to be humble, to be close to the people he serves, to walk with them, to suffer with them.” 

Much has been made of Prevost’s X account, which was recently confirmed to belong to the new pontiff by journalist Rocco Palmo. That account is mostly fairly standard Catholic stuff—pictures of church gatherings and community events. But it is outspoken on one subject: That JD Vance, the Catholic convert who is currently vice president, has views on migration that deviate substantially from the Gospels. Prevost has posted and reposted several posts and articles attacking Vance’s treatment of migrants. Pope Leo XIV will continue his predecessor’s work in one other notable way as well: By hating JD Vance. 

It’s clear that Pope Leo XIV cares deeply about the plight of migrants, like Francis before him. Whether he has strong feelings about deep-dish pizza or the Chicago Bears quarterback situation is another matter altogether. 

The first American-born pope is not a fan of the Trump administration.

Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, who is now Pope Leo XIV, has multiple posts on his X account that criticize or outright rebuke the words and policies of President Trump.

In February, he shared an article from the National Catholic Reporter titled “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others,” in response to Vance’s bastardization of the concept of ordo amaris, a narrow interpretation of love that Pope Francis himself admonished.

In April, he reposted Catholic writer Rocco Palmo, who wrote, “As Trump & Bukele use Oval to [aid] Feds’ illicit deportation of a US resident, once an undoc-ed Salvadorean himself, now-[Auxiliary Bishop Evelio Menjivar of Washington, D.C.] asks, “Do you not see the suffering? Is your conscience not disturbed? How can you stay quiet?”

Pope Leo was also critical of Trump’s family separation policy. In 2018, he retweeted a scathing post from Cardinal Cupich: “There is nothing remotely Christian, American, or morally defensible about a policy that takes children away from their parents and warehouses them in cages. This is being carried out in our name and the shame is on us all.”

The new pope also has multiple reposts showing sympathy and support for George Floyd, the Black man whose police murder was a catalyst for racial justice movements in 2020. He reposted words in opposition to Trump’s refugee ban and Muslim ban, as well as articles on “rivers of blood” flowing from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the Russian attack on a Catholic missionary headquarters in Mariupol.

The pope is expected to strike a Francis-like chord on issues of immigration and poverty, two things the current administration is directly opposed to.