Former president Donald Trump flew a newly-freed Nelson Mandela from South Africa to the United States in 1990 when there were no other options, according to a recently resurfaced report from the Los Angeles Times.
The story reappeared on X (formerly Twitter) in the context of repeated claims by Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign, and by the left-leaning media, that Trump is a racist who should not be returned to office.
The story, “Trump Takes Mandela Under His Wing,” appeared in the Times on June 25, 1990:
One of the last details to be arranged in Nelson Mandela’s hastily orchestrated tour of the United States was lining up the aircraft that would take him to the eight cities on his itinerary.
After feverish and failed negotiations with everyone from the U.S. government to private charter operators, the unlikely benefactor has turned out to be none other than Donald Trump.
Mandela and the approximately 80 people traveling with him arrived here Sunday in a Trump Shuttle 727 and will take the same plane on the rest of the tour, which ends in Los Angeles and Oakland late this week. The Trump shuttle also carried Mandela from New York to Boston on Saturday.
Mandela’s group wanted to rent the plane, and did so for a cost of $130,000, or $1625 per person for the entire trip (about $3900 in today’s dollars, still a bargain price for an overseas trip with visits to four major U.S. cities).
Mandela was freed in February 1990 after 27 years in prison. He agreed to end the “armed struggle” against the apartheid regime and to negotiate with it instead.
After four years of talks, South Africa held its first truly democratic election on April 27, 1994. Mandela’s party won a majority and he went on to become South Africa’s first black president, and its first democratically-elected one.
Mandela served for one five-year term before retiring to allow a peaceful transition of power to his successor.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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