(Daily Signal)—Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick praised President Donald Trump’s courage and tenacity in confronting the president of South Africa with a video showing chants of “Kill the Boer, Kill the [white] farmer” in the Oval Office.
“Well, the president is willing to call it out, straight out, right to the president of South Africa and say, ‘Look there’s genocide going on for white farmers, ‘Kill the Boer, Kill the white farmer,’” Lutnick told Axios’ Mike Allen on Wednesday after Trump played the video.
When Allen mentioned that Trump “doesn’t mind an uncomfortable moment,” Lutnick said, “Oh boy, was it uncomfortable.”
Lutnick recalled, “You know, I walk in and he’s got the video screen up and I know what video he’s going to play, and I’m like, ‘Whoa, this is going to be one of those!’”
The commerce secretary noted that Trump and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa “had a serious discussion” privately.
“He’s amazing that he would do it straight up, right to it, no nonsense,” Lutnick said. “Let’s bring it, the guy’s here, let’s try to fix it, right? Is this guy our friend or is he an enemy?”
“Let’s bring it out, let’s have the discussion, let’s understand it, let’s know it,” Lutnick continued. “That’s someone who’s unafraid and willing to do it.”
“That’s why it’s amazing to be part of his government,” the commerce secretary concluded.
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In a February executive order, Trump condemned South Africa’s Expropriation Act 13 of 2024, legislation enabling the government to “seize ethnic minority Afrikaners’ agricultural property without compensation.” He also condemned “disproportionate violence against racially disfavored landowners.”
The South African government claimed that “the foundational premise” of Trump’s order “lacks factual accuracy and fails to recognize South Africa’s profound and painful history of colonialism and Apartheid.” The government denounced “what seems to be a campaign of misinformation and propaganda aimed at misrepresenting our great nation.”
Trump welcomed Afrikaner refugees to the United States earlier this month.
Defenders of the expropriation law cite South Africa’s history of racial segregation under white minority rule, and reference a 2017 land audit finding that white people, who comprise 8% of the population, owned about three-quarters of farms and agricultural holdings. Advocates say the government could only buy land for redistribution to black owners under a “willing-seller, willing-buyer” model, while large amounts of white-owned land remained unused, Time magazine reported.
Critics like Trump and Elon Musk, however, note a history of violence against white farmers and the use of political songs that translate to “kill the white farmer.” The song’s defenders say it is symbolic of fighting Apartheid, rather than a suggestion of violence in the here and now.
? JUST SHOWN IN THE OVAL OFFICE: Proof of Persecution in South Africa. pic.twitter.com/rER1l8sqAU
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) May 21, 2025
After the discussion on South Africa, Lutnick explained the Trump Gold Card, a new avenue for foreigners to obtain permanent resident status for $5 million.
“Everyone I meet who’s not an American is going to want to buy the card if they have the fiscal capacity,” the secretary said. “This is for people who can help America pay off its debt. Why wouldn’t you want a Plan B that says, ‘God forbid something bad happens, you come to the airport in America and the person in immigration says, ‘Welcome home.’”
The “gold card” visa would replace the EB-5 investor visa, which costs between $100,000 and $200,000 in fees. Investors have to commit to invest between $800,000 and $1 million and hire at least 10 Americans.
Critics, like Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., warn that the policy may exclude job creators.
“You don’t need to have $5 million in your bank account to build a successful company in America. Just look at Sergey Brin, Sundar Pichai, or Satya Nadella,” Khanna told Newsweek in February.
Lutnick also addressed Allen’s questions on tariffs, describing Trump’s tariffs as a way to get better deals for American workers and businesses. He condemned globalist policies and nation-building following wars.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.