Patrick Gaspard
speaker
119 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 18 Dec
Patrick Gaspard’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 1.
Appearances
What if this was someone in your family that had a chronic illness that they could not get away from?
Listen, these polls, like three years out, are, you know, they are what they are.
But let the record show, I would stomp him.
I would stomp him!
Yeah.
The Bulwark Daily · S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption · 10 Apr 2025
podcast
And I appreciate that you're starting there instead of the liberation from Liberation Day, which I'm sure will... I'm sure we'll get to it at some point.
But look, the South African thing is something that my friends in South Africa are struggling to understand because they are so used to dealing with American politicians, Democrats and Republicans, whose agendas are kind of transparent, that are tied. to these outcomes and trade and security. And they've been responding in a very traditional way.
And it's not working because there was nothing traditional about this. So here's the first thing I'd say. The kind of miracle of Donald Trump as president of the United States in the foreign policy space is that he's managed to collapse the daylight between foreign policy and domestic political constituency.
That's the really important thing to understand about this guy that makes him incredibly different than any president
I think that the only time we've ever had this kind of conflation of domestic politics with foreign policy and this kind of a way that's suffused throughout is under Eisenhower in the McCarthy era, where foreign policy was a servant to domestic politics in a way that just hasn't been since. And so for Trump, that's an important thing to understand.
And why is that relevant in the South African space? Trump's been obsessed with South Africa even before he was actually president. He would post on social media about the rights of Africana farmers.
He would lift up all these discredited myths and narratives about the oppression of that minority in the country in ways that were shocking for anyone, black or white, that had been involved or even at the margins of of the anti-apartheid movement and that era where we understood clearly there is a white minority that was oppressing a black majority in South Africa.
Not the story that Trump told before or during his first presidency or in this new period. And right now, even though white South Africans make up about 7% of the total population, They control over 70% of the private land that's available in the country for farming, for business development, etc. It's an astonishing ratio.
The government has been trying to solve for that challenge when you have a population overwhelmingly black, poor population. that has experienced a political revolution and transformation in the country, but not an economic transformation. So they get Blacks more into the center of the economy to try to solve for that disparity and that land challenge.
They did so by moving a piece of legislation, not without controversy in South Africa, around the reappropriation of land that is not being used.
So I want to be clear, this is not land that white farmers are sitting on top of, but land that's not being used and the appropriation of that land would have to go through all kinds of bureaucratic procedures in order for the government to be able to secure it for new purposes. Donald Trump and Elon Musk, who, of course, is a South African expat.
Peter Thiel, another South African expat that's in that circle, obsessed.
David Sachs, another one. There are a number of men who kind of lift up this false story about the oppression of white people in South Africa, because I believe for Trump. It actually speaks to a domestic French political audience that has its own obsessions around a grievance politics that's tied to supremacy movements and replacement theory. So all this stuff is in service of that politics.
He seizes on this new legislation that's passed in South Africa as a result of this. We're going to blow up the trade relationship, the security relationship between the two countries. South Africa is really reliant on the US, on USAID, on the bipartisan PEPFAR program to stand up infrastructure for its healthcare in the country.
That's a country that has the highest percentage of HIV, AIDS positive people in the country than any other. And South Africa also depends on a trade relationship with the U.S., something called the African Growth and Opportunity Act that I was privileged to help renegotiate in the Obama administration. that gives South Africa access to U.S. markets in a beneficial way.
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