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**FEBRUARY 11, 2025**

On the Prospect website

Vought Restores CFPB Procedure That Sustains Mortgage Markets [link removed]
The situation reveals that sometimes, even arsonists need the building they're burning down to stay upright. BY DAVID DAYEN

Trump, Man of Steel (and Aluminum) [link removed]
The new 25 percent tariffs on steel and aluminum, directed mainly at China, are partially worthwhile, but were undercut by allowing Nippon Steel to buy into U.S. Steel. BY ROBERT KUTTNER

Will Trump Continue to Defy Court Orders? [link removed]
As long as nobody will stop him, why wouldn't he? BY DAVID DAYEN

Meyerson on TAP

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**** Trump Finds a Set of Refugees He Welcomes

While expelling nonwhite refugees here legally, he invites in white South Africans who say they don't want to come.

Donald Trump's drive to establish autocratic despotism has understandably overshadowed his drive to make U.S. policy align with his other preferred -isms. This has had the effect of relegating to the back pages one Trump policy that is the most overt expression of white racism imaginable: his cutting off aid to South Africa for its alleged persecution of its Afrikaners.

Afrikaners-the descendants of the Dutch settlers who instituted the apartheid policies of the nation's ancien r??gime, and who today constitute 4 percent of the nation's population but still own the lion's share of the nation's farmland-have suddenly become a uniquely imperiled minority that Trump wishes to help. Some among them have expressed distress at a new South African law that enables that nation's government to subject some farms to a kind of generally compensated eminent domain so that the nation's nonwhite citizens, who make up 90 percent of the nation's population, can gain access to farmland, too. Trump, perhaps egged on by South African ??migr?? Elon Musk, sees this as Black persecution of whites, and has cut off all aid to the country.

But that's not really the Trump action that most clearly illustrates our nation's new dive into white racism. What really makes this policy so glaringly racist is Trump's invitation to Afrikaners to settle in the United States [link removed], despite his suspension of asylum and Temporary Protected Status for refugees from anyplace else.

Even as Trump was inviting the Afrikaners in, he was tossing Venezuelans out, flying them back [link removed] to their autocratic homeland, which has been busily locking up not just its pro-democracy opponents, but stray civilians who wandered into the vicinity of demonstrations. In recent years, more than 550,000 Venezuelans have come to the United States under our Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program that enables refugees from tyranny and selected national disasters to gain legal entry to the U.S.

Trump has now unilaterally abrogated [link removed] that status for 300,000 Venezuelans who entered under TPS in 2023, ordering them to leave within 60 days; another quarter-million will be subject to deportation in September.

[link removed]

What's particularly notable about these actions is that Trump has long called Venezuela's Maduro regime an autocratic enemy of the United States, and unlike most Trump pronunciamentos, this one is correct. Moreover, like refugees from other anti-democratic nations that cloak their tyranny in what they claim is socialism (Cubans, Vietnamese, and those who came from then-Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe), the Venezuelan population, located disproportionately in Florida, has preponderantly aligned itself with the Republican Party and Trump himself. Those who've become citizens have pushed Florida deeper into the Republican column. And now, like the Michigan Palestinians who backed Trump, they feel acutely betrayed [link removed].

What they failed to recognize was that Trump's war on immigrants is, as near as he can make it, total. It's one of the two elements of his "mandate" that has clear majority support in the polls (the other is reducing the cost of living), and it's also a clear expression of his deep desire to make America white again.

If anyone doubts that latter explanation, how do they explain his one exception to his war on immigrants: his invitation to South Africa's Afrikaners-not merely white but also the architects (or descendants of architects) of that nation's apartheid system-whose racist laws so appalled Congress in 1986 that more than two-thirds of the members of each house, with heavy bipartisan support, overrode a Ronald Reagan veto [link removed] to impose sanctions on that nation?

The irony is that Afrikaner community leaders have responded to Trump's invitation with statements making clear that they don't want to come to America [link removed]. "Our members work here, and want to stay here, and they are going to stay here," said Dirk Hermann, who heads an Afrikaner organization that claims two million members. Appearing at the same news conference, Kallie Kriel, the CEO of AfriForum, an Afrikaner lobby, said, "We have to state categorically: We don't want to move elsewhere."

So: Trump is expelling desperate refugees from tyrannical nations who have come here legally under our TPS system, and inviting in whites who he says are suffering from a racist Black regime, who actually are anything but desperate and have no interest in leaving.

If Trump doesn't watch out, some might even accuse him of having a race-based double standard.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

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