New US envoy might be more conservative than me, says SA-born Pollak, who lost out on job

Leo Brent Bozell III, Donald Trump’s nominee for US ambassador to South Africa. (Kris Connor / Getty Images)

By Peter Fabricius

30 Mar 2025

Joel Pollak says Pretoria must compromise, not explain, if it wants to restore relations with Donald Trump.

Leo Brent Bozell III, the conservative commentator and media critic President Donald Trump nominated last week as ambassador to South Africa “might… be more strident than I am”, says South African-born Trump supporter Joel Pollak, who was angling for the job himself.

Some South Africans had hoped he himself would not get the job, Pollak said on Ferial Haffajee’s Power Chat videocast.

“So now you get what you wished for. Now you get someone who, in many ways, might be more strident than I am in his conservatism. So good luck with that.”

Pollak runs the conservative Breitbart News site and has been a constant and severe critic of South Africa. His report on the remarks South Africa’s ambassador to the US Ebrahim Rasool made on a webinar about Trump’s alleged white supremacy on 14 March 2025 probably contributed to Rasool’s expulsion from the US and the job.

Pollak told Haffajee that he had been told that he was “on a very, very short list” for the job but that ultimately Trump had made the decision. He suggested it might have been because the South African government had made it clear that it didn’t want him coming.

Pollak suggested the right way to manage the relationship with Trump was to offer him compromises.

“You can decide what those compromises will be.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z96UkW7SM7E&ab_channel=DailyMaverick

South Africa was taking the wrong approach by trying to convince the Trump administration that it had been misinformed about South African policies.

Pollak said that because Trump had been banned from social media during the Joe Biden administration “for allegedly spreading misinformation”, the term “misinformation” was “quite a volatile one in the United States” and so Pretoria suggesting Trump was misinformed on South Africa just “exacerbated the rift”.

“I think the South African government needs to understand – it doesn’t matter who you send to Washington. It’s not about the person. It really is about the policies.”

Trump wants to reset the relationship with South Africa, which had a great deal of potential, including in trade, he said.

“But South Africa has to decide that it stands with the democratic West. It has to decide that it’s going to protect the property rights of investors, and it has to decide that it’s going to protect minority rights in South Africa,” he said, referring to Afrikaners especially, who had an audience in the US.

Read more: Long walk to fleedom for 70,000 Afrikaners — US bureaucracy rises to occasion

Pollak said the African Growth and Opportunity Act (Agoa) was in trouble because the Trump administration and the Republican Congress were sceptical of trade deals in which the US gives preference to other countries (Agoa participants do not have to reciprocate the duty-free access to the US they get).

Trump doesn’t like multilateral treaties and preferred direct relationships with other countries, because he felt that in multilateral arrangements other countries could gang up against the US.

bozell pollak Leo Brent Bozell III, Donald Trump’s nominee for US ambassador to South Africa. (Kris Connor / Getty Images)

Agoa gives eligible sub-Saharan countries duty-free access to the US market for most of their exports. South African motor car manufacturers and wine and fruit producers have done particularly well from it. But the whole programme has to be re-authorised by the US Congress in September.

Pollak added that South Africa had “forfeited its right to participate in Agoa” by violating the Agoa legislation which said that countries that violated the national security interests or foreign policy interests of the US could not participate in the agreement.

He cited in particular an opinion article which President Cyril Ramaphosa and other left-wing foreign leaders had recently published in Foreign Policy magazine accusing Israel of violating international law in Gaza, touting their own efforts to prosecute Israel for genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and International Criminal Court (ICC), and attacking Trump’s proposal to annex Gaza and deport Palestinians.

Read more: Middle East crisis

Pollak noted that Ramaphosa had taken on Trump directly in the article. He said Trump regarded the ICC as a threat to US national security interests and had sanctioned it in his first term because it had tried to prosecute US soldiers in Afghanistan.

The ICC had also issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant, Pollak noted. South Africa had taken Israel to the ICJ “and accused it falsely of genocide because it responded to a truly genocidal attack on October 7th by Hamas. And that’s also against the foreign policy interest of the United States. So simply, in those two actions alone, South Africa has forfeited its right to participate in Agoa.”

Haffajee said to Pollak that it seemed that the wedge issue for the US was that South Africa would have to drop its case against Israel at the ICJ (to normalise relations with the US) and that was not going to happen. She asked him if South Africa didn’t have the right to choose its own relationships, while still maintaining a trade relationship with the US.

Pollak replied: “South Africa absolutely has the sovereignty and the right to do whatever it wishes in global affairs. However, there is a cost if you choose to try to stop Israel from defending itself against terrorists. Then there are people who are going to disagree with that, and there may be a cost.”

One of the costs, he said, was now being borne by the University of Cape Town, which he claimed had just lost two-thirds of its private funding because it had boycotted Israeli institutions. He added that no country had the right to be subsidised by other countries for the choices it made in foreign policy.

Haffajee noted that Pollak had been born and had spent his formative years in South Africa and seemed to have learnt some of his ideas in South Africa, such as his campaign for maternity rights.

“I do wonder, when did things come so asunder between you and a country that you called home for long periods of your life?” she asked.

“Well, I don’t think they’ve come asunder,” he replied. “I feel a great deal of warmth towards South Africa. I take an interest in South Africa and I really love talking about South Africa because I think the themes that South Africa grapples with and has grappled with for the last several decades are really the great themes of the human experience. I’m talking about issues of poverty, inequality, opportunity, economic growth. How do you create a free society in a post-conflict situation?”

But he also felt “a profound sense of disappointment in how South Africa has turned out”. When he visited South Africa over the past few years, “It was quite stunning how far the infrastructure had crumbled in Johannesburg in particular.”

South Africa taking Israel to the ICJ was “the one thing that does make me feel alienated from South Africa and I say this as a Jew, I’m a South African Jew”.

“I think that really was for me, something very hard to absorb personally. It didn’t sever my relationship with South Africa, but it could.”

Haffajee asked Pollak how he could justify the Trump administration taking a chainsaw to institutions like USAID and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which had been doing such good work, including in South Africa.

Pollak replied that the US government had to cut its deficit and national debt which were far too large because both Republicans and Democrats had lacked the political will to cut spending over the years. “There’s a huge amount of bureaucracy that doesn’t actually do anything, or that repeats functions other government agencies already perform, and the only way to do it is in this drastic fashion.”

He noted how in the corporate world “there’s no kindness, there’s no process in a failing company. There are just layoffs. That’s it. You arrive at work on Monday and they tell you, we’re losing money. We’re cutting 25% of the workforce. Pack your bags. You have 15 minutes to hand in your ID.”

He acknowledged that the National Institutes of Health had done some great work but “also some terrible things,” alleging, for instance, that it had been funding research in China despite the fact that The New York Times had reported that it might have been a lab leak in China that had caused the Covid pandemic.

He said the Trump administration had discovered that a lot of the government funding to USAID was going to interest groups aligned to the Democratic Party, some of which worked to ensure Democrats were re-elected.

Haffajee put it to him that USAID had been doing really great work in South Africa, including fighting HIV/Aids and TB and running libraries.

“Why does America have to fund that?” Pollak retorted, suggesting that South Africa should fund these programmes itself.

When Haffajee replied that “that’s a perfectly fair question to ask of a middle-income country”, Pollak said that “you have enough money to spend on sending troops to the DRC. You have enough money to spend on the Gautrain and other public works projects that are very fancy perhaps, but they don’t really seem to benefit ordinary people”.

Pollak took some credit for the blizzard of executive orders that Trump fired off immediately on taking office, saying that “it is interesting the degree to which the president has followed the suggestions in my book”, a reference to “The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days”, which he published in December.

“The only surprising thing to me has been the speed at which he has moved,” he told Haffajee.

trump executive order

He said the book was inspired by the realisation that in Trump’s first term the Democrats had tried to prevent him from governing by blocking his executive actions in Congress and the courts.

“So I thought, well, he has to make many more of them because that’s the only way to overwhelm this legal strategy that Democrats have used in the courts. And he seems to have followed that. He has launched over 100 executive orders as of this stage, and he is on his way to implementing many of them.”

Pollak rebutted the criticism that by relying so heavily on executive action and overriding Congress and the courts, Trump was “leaning towards autocracy”. He suggested this accusation was simply Democratic Party scare tactics, noting that they had always run against Trump on the fear he would overturn democracy.

“What Trump is doing with the executive orders is often simply reflecting the preferences of the vast majority of Americans and preferences that are often ignored by Washington because of reasons of political correctness. I mean, for example, transgender men in female sports. Now there’s an effort.” DM

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