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.