What did Donald Trump do today?

He got told by South Africa's "oppressed" "refugee" white minority that they were neither oppressed nor refugees.

Although apartheid rule ended thirty years ago, there are still massive racial imbalances in South African society. White South Africans make up about 7% of the population, but they own 70% of the nation's farmland, virtually all of which was stripped from Black landowners under apartheid. Recently, the government passed reform laws aimed at making sure that arable land was actually being used, and at redressing historical land seizures from Black citizens. Much like the eminent domain clause in the United States constitution, the new law defines a legal process through which the state can claim privately owned land in exchange for "just and equitable" compensation.

Trump, who has rarely shown any interest in South Africa, has suddenly become outspoken on their land reform debate. He signed an executive order yesterday barring foreign aid to South Africa, forbade his own Secretary of State from attending the G20 summit being held in Johannesburg, and offered to resettle the white Afrikaners displaced by the law in the United States.

(This may be the first and only time Trump has ever spoken positively of immigration from Africa, which he has previously referred to as "shithole countries.")

But as representatives of pro-Afrikaner advocacy groups pointed out today, there aren't any such displaced white landholders, and they don't want Trump's help—or to be cast as a downtrodden, helpless group when in fact they exercise enormous influence in South African politics.

There have been conspiracy theories and false reports of a genocide against white South Africans, and Trump has been fooled by them in the past. But more recently, he seems to be acting at the direction of his patron Elon Musk, whose family fortune dates back to the apartheid regime.

Trump, who has resumed his previous practice of taking long weekends at his golf resorts in Florida, did not comment on the matter today.

Why does this matter?

• American foreign policy should serve American interests, not settle political scores for wealthy individuals.

• It's embarrassing if both sides of a debate in another country's have to tell an American president he doesn't know what he's talking about.