Donald Trump the Megathread part II - mod warnings in OP, Updated 18/03/25

I note that you have not addressed the root question I posed and repeat again: What policies, rules, regulations etc are no longer in place which were in place six months ago which have a practical effect upon my formation?

To address this. As noted in the document you linked, one of the primary goals of this policy relates to manning.

Key Tasks: The following tasks will ensure that all Army policies and strategic plans
incorporate the need to Acquire, Develop, Employ, and Retain individuals through
career progression and assignment selection. It will enable the establishment and
sustainment of cohesive teams comprised of individuals with diverse Knowledge, Skills,
Behaviors, and Preferences (KSB-Ps) and backgrounds to change Army culture toward
a positive and inclusive environment.

Task 7.1.a. Develop and implement mechanisms to integrate and synergize diversity
outreach and goals with Army recruitment strategies to enhance leader participation in
acquiring the best talent from diverse backgrounds.

This cuts to one of the most damaging impacts from Hegseth's policies. He is deliberately looking to create a culture that denigrates anyone who isn't a white, christian man. At a time when the military faces existential issues with recruitment, how is "Lethality" improved by this. Telling women and minorities that they aren't valued, and the military doesn't want them.

Objective End State: The Army sustains Army-wide listening sessions gaining direct
feedback on the success of current programs and initiatives while simultaneously
providing Soldiers and DA Civilians a mechanism to identify potential issues. The
feedback will enable the Army to remain flexible and competitive in acquiring and
retaining twenty-first century talent and demonstrate growth in expanding DEIA
principles across the Total Force.

Key Tasks: The following tasks will enable the Army to establish a cultural baseline and
show positive growth over time in Army policies on the recruitment and retention of
individuals.

The rest of the document is framed in the effort to understand the effectiveness of such policies. Choosing to forego engagement with the force, to understand the experiences of service members is certainly not going improve cohesiveness and trust in leadership.

I can’t help whatever inequities, discrimination or harassment women have suffered in the past. What I can affect is I can ensure the men and women (or choose characteristic of choice) under my command are given the opportunities, treatment, and respect that their rank and position merit without regard to their gender, and I have the tools to do it and enforce it. What more do you propose? I don’t want a policy statement about the history of inequity, give me a practical issue going forward which I am missing. It seems to me that the best way to ensure that everyone is treated equally is to, well, treat them equally. Explain to me why this is a bad policy, and what you think I should be doing which I am not.

How effective is your ability to build this culture of respect? You're not present at the squad level in any real sense. You aren't party to the conversations that occur. You aren't there for example when a hispanic soldier has to listen to their Trump supporting platoon sergeant is talking about how great it is that all the illegals are getting kicked out. You aren't seeing the junior enlisted who may be denied opportunities for schooling that would make them competitive for promotion, because there leader doesn't like them based on their ethnicity or gender. You have a very shallow capacity to impact these things, as any leader does. You are one person, in an organisation where it's leader is clearly and purposefully pursuing a policy that elevates white supremacists. He's pushing out experienced leaders and replacing them with sycophants and lickspittles, who will aggressively push his agenda. You can say all the right things, and try to live the example you want to see, but that flies in the face of the culture the SecDef is pushing.

Explain to me why this is a bad policy, and what you think I should be doing which I am not.

Explain how you think it's a good one? DEI is a convenient dog whistle that lets them say N***er with a wink wink to their fellow racists. It's not fooling anyone. What negative impact did these policies bring that getting rid of them is a beneficial outcome. Please explain how you think that lethality has been improved, as Hegseth claims.

Well, I do note that Genocide Watch's most recent report on South Africa dates from 2019, they haven't updated their web page on South Africa since 2021, and they don't have a current alert in place in relation to South Africa. All of this suggests that things may have improved somewhat in South Africa and it may have dropped off the radar of GW as a result.

The issue is topical now because Trump is making claims about genocide in South Africa, and affording it a pre-eminent status; white South Africans are pretty much the only catogory of refugee that is welcome in the US these days. Obviously, the fact that Trump says that South Africa is perpetrating genocide against its white citizens has no probative or evidential value at all; Trump making this claim is not a reason to think that it is actually happening and, on the whole, Trump making claims of this kind is, on balance, more likely to make people sceptical of the idea that white South Africans are the victims of genocide than it is to make them believe it.

It's also problematic because Trump, plainly, is unbothered by genocide. Genocide Watch's reports on, and warnings about, Israel and its actions in Gaza are much more recent, and much more severe, and GW does have a current alert about Israel that is at a higher level than any alert it has ever had about South Africa, but the Trump administration continues to provide unqualified support and assistance to Israel in its actions in Gaza.

So, whatever the reason that Trump is bleating about genocide in South Africa, it will not be because he takes exception to genocide. And this again will make people sceptical that his claims have any truth to them; they will be looking behind those claims to see what Trump's true agenda is.

All of which is most unfortunate for white South Africans, if indeed they are suffering from genocide or persecution. Trump's choice to exploit their situation for whatever depraved purpose he has is likely to make their position worse, not better.

Far too many people form opinions on situations around the world based entirely around what politician happens to be talking about it and what they are saying.

In 2011, that topic was being discussed without any particular ties to Western politics. Now the entire debate is centred around Musk and Trump and people automatically assume there is nothing at all happening in South Africa, the ANC are doing a great job, and it's all conspiratorial lies. All of us who have listened to South Africans telling us about rapes and land theft and extreme violence for over a decade are obviously just Musk and Trump supporters, somehow before those names were even part of the conversation.

Political discourse is just a sport now.

A few points:

• The main point: Any enquiry into whether any, and if so what kind of, oppression, persecution or genocide is being perperated against white South Africans is hampered, not helped, by the cause being taken up and amplified by Donald Trump. I think you and I would probably agree on that — any discourse that involves Trump is automatically toxified and polarised.
• Relatedly, the fact that Trump characterises what is going on as a genocide is . . . unhelpful. If it fall short of a genocide (and, spoiler alert, it will turn out that it probably does) people will assume that Trump is, once again, full of shït and there is nothing to see here. In fact there could be something to see here.
• Does it fall short of genocide? Yes, it does. The highest rating that Genocide Watch ever gave to South Africa was stage 6 ("Polarisation"), in 2019. That's the same rating that they afforded to the UK in 2022. Do you think there was a genocide going on in the UK in 2022? No, me neither.
• But that doesn't mean there is nothing to see here. There may well be racial oppression of some kind — of a very serious kind — going on. Or, there may not.
• South Africa is, and always has been, a violent society with a very high crime rate. I haven't seen anything to suggest that white South Africans are disproportionately the victims of violence or crime. In the Bad Old Days white South Africans were somewhat insulated from the worst impacts of crime and violence because the the resources of the state were, overwhelmingly disproportionately, devoted to protecting whites, and serving the needs of whites. The loss of that kind of privilege can feel, to those who experience it, like discrimination or oppression. But, actually, it isn't. So if we're going to make the case that white South Africans are singled out as the victims of crime and violence, or that the state pays less attention to protecting them than it does to protecting other citizens, it's not enough that white South Africans feel that way. We need to find actual data that compares their experience with that of their non-white citizens, and that confirms those impressions.
• My sense is that a better case for white oppression can be made in relation to land expropriation. South Africa does have quite sweeping laws that allow the government to expropriate land and, reportedly, these are used mainly to expropriate farms. The law itself is racially neutral, but farms are overwhelmingly in white ownership. Hence, these laws tend to affect white citizens more than other citizens. Furthermore, while the default rule is that compensation must be paid when land is expropriated, the laws do allow expropriation without compensation in certain circumstances, so they can be quite severe in their impact.
• But, informed by the Irish precedent, we'd be slow to leap to the conclusion that this amounts to discrimination against white citizens. We have our own history of land expropriation in Ireland, and we generally regard it as a progressive and beneficial policy. It's true that it overwhelmingly impacted Protestants and unionists, but that's because land ownership was overwhelmingly concentrated in Protestant and unionist hands, for historical reasons that we all know. Something similar is at play in South Africa; farmland is concentrated in white ownership, both because of large-scale seizures of land by white poeople that the colonial-era and apartheid-era governments legitimated, and because of apartheid-era laws that were in place for decades that simply banned black people from owning farms. So any attempt to redistribute farmland is going to disproportionately impact white people. That doesn't make it an anti-white measure. The potential for race-based oppression is certainly there but, again, we'd want to look in detail at how the land expropriation laws are operated in practice before we could conclude that race-based oppression is actually happening.

The issue here is not SA. Just as it wasn't Zelensky and his suits.

It's the crash, boorish, & bullying behaviour of Trump and his cabinet that is the issue.

If SA has a problem by all means bring it up with the SA delegation but no need for this type of ambush and complete lack of respect.

And you can see from Trumps reaction to the question about the plane that he hates having people question him or bring up things he doesn't like yet he continues to use it himself.

It is beneath the office of POTUS that he, apparently the world's greatest deal maker, has no other means than a TV ambush.

And you have people of here arguing semantics and splitting hairs when Trump nevers cares about either and os well known for his lack of real knowledge or attention to detail.

This is the man that apparently got confused over two different numbers in relation to Bidens cancer but we are supposed to believe he has indepth knowledge of SA politics and it's death rates?

His racism is there in plain sight, he is literally screaming it on live TV, but he gets a pass.

The SA president should have simply retorted that there are good people on both sides.

What a weird **** hill to die on. Whether he said the word ‘genocide’ yesterday in the oval office or not, he has said it about South Africa in the last couple of weeks and it’s clearly what he was implying yesterday. Are you really that naïve to think he wasn’t? Google ‘Trump genocide South Africa’ and have a look through the results.
As for the other nonsense about “indiscriminate killing of white farmers”, same question again.
26,000+ murders in SA in 2024. 44 of those were linked to farming communities. 8 were farmers. So that means 36 of them were farm workers (which you can be 99.9% sure were black). Why isn’t dozy Don highlighting the indiscriminate killing of black farm workers in South Africa? He wouldn’t be a lying racist would he?

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-makes-false-claims-white-genocide-south-africa-during-ramaphosa-meeting-2025-05-21/

No, that is not the discussion at hand. It is the discussion you want to have because there is no defence of his actual behaviour. So you deflect on whether a single word was used, exactly what context it was used. As if Trump has ever bothered with facts on sticking to what people say or do.

Turns out Michael Martin did a fantastic job when he met Trump, he didn't end up getting completely abused and humiliated by a raving nut case. POTUS has one of the biggest intelligence gathering agencies in the world reporting directly to him, and yet his 'evidence' was printouts of newspaper articles and a video which no one has a clue what it actually was.

The SA Delegation repeatedly told him that he was incorrect, but he wasn't interested. Just like with Zelensky. The point is to make Trump look like a strong man, he is in charge, yet he crumbles in the face of anyone whi stands up to him. Putin, Carney, Xi.

When a reporter asked Trump what he thinks should be done to deal with this apparent genocide, his response? "I don't know". He doesn't care. He just wants to act tough and be a bully.

He is a bully who is destroying the soft power of the POTUS, and the US is rapidly losing any semblance of being a stable or productive partner.

"Mr President, your poll numbers are still above 10000% and you're the greatest and most popular man that ever lived. But some people are complaining a bit. How will we make you even more popular?"

"Lets do some racist dog-whistling. That always works. Get me a black leader in the Oval Office, I'll take it form there."

Sadly, in modern America, this works.

It's "collusion" argument,

or the "he wasn't found "guilty" of sexual assault,

or "it wasn't rape, it was sexual assault".

Dancing on the head of a pin, instead of discussing matters with context.

Always excusing, always twisting away from proper discussion.

It's just a tactic deployed to defend Trump when you can't defend him any other way. It's not done out of some great reverence for the specific meaning of words, because it's not deployed to defend those with different political viewpoints.

Talk about not being able to see the wood from the trees.

Anyone paying attention to Trump's conduct over the years can clearly see he was associating genocide and South Africa together - and we're expected to care about what exact words used.
Eh nope.
Instead of what Trump is doing and has been doing?

If racist Nazi trolls like Musk were running South Africa, you can be sure no matter how many black farmers were killed, Trump wouldn't say a word. He's probably come out praising them.
Just another example of Trump's racism. And he doesn't give two hoots about genocide, would only be too happy to engage in it if it suited his purposes.

Desperate desperate stuff altogether. I'm sure Trump would be delighted there's people fighting his corner on social media over such technicalities, ignoring his reprehensible conduct.

He likes things golden… apparantly

Trumps beautiful. New bill will decrease medicaid for all reduce money for local services while increasing government debt by trillions of dollars it reduces quality of life for all workers but it reduces tax's for the rich by a billion dollars for the first time in 100 years Moody's has downgraded Americas credit rating interest rates will rise walmart has said tariffs will increase the cost of goods in stores the dollar is losing its value as the world's reserve currency investors are switching to Bitcoin or buying gold instead of buying us government bonds Trump is saying he won't cut medicaid while passing a bill that cuts medicaid doge will not save a penny as it has sacked it's workers who collect money from billionaires. There are supposed to grants for rebuilding but they are not being paid out to help rebuild los Angeles and other citys where 1000,s of homes have burned down . Fema is not doing the work it should as it has had workers laid off

Doge should stand for Destroy our great economy

Many companies are not hiring due to the impact of tariffs Many tech company's are laying off staff as they can be replaced by AI programs 100s of local rural hospitals may close as they rely mostly on Medicaid to pay staff and they can't negotiate rates with big insurance companies who own hospitals in citys

The new obsession with South Africa is likely coming from both Vance and Musk. Vance is heavily connected with Peter Thiel who was raised in SA during apartheid and has always been pretty supportive of that system.

It says a lot that Trump has not said a word to Putin about genocide and has tacitly approved of it in Palestine. His lecture to the South African president comes across like a teen who just saw something on YouTube.

in fairness to manicmoran, he is in the very best position to have a view/opinion of the US Armed Forces, I certainly would him at his word