TRUMP HAS NO IDEA WHERE CONGO IS

US President Donald Trump's ignorance is again on display, as he admitted to not knowing where the Congo is whilst hosting Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni on 17 April at the White House.

As they took questions from the press, Trump responded on the illegal deportation to El Salvador of a Salvadoran citizen living in the US on a work permit, Abrego Garcia. The US has outsourced its prison-industrial complex, migrant detention and torture to the Central American country, denying many the US right to due process.

Trump seems not to have bothered to find the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) on a map since he first accused the country of releasing inmates to the US during his 2024 campaign. He presented no supporting evidence, with the DRC and the neighbouring Republic of Congo condemning him.

His ignorance is especially damning, considering how crucial the DRC is to the US economy. Tech giants like Apple, Dell, Google, Microsoft and Tesla depend on minerals like cobalt to power their devices. The DRC has more than 50 per cent of the world’s cobalt reserves. The exploitation of DRC’s minerals hasn’t been a net positive for the Congolese people, with more than 7 million of whom have been displaced from their lands, suffer from a polluted environment and are vulnerable to s*xual violence. In 2024, a US court ruled against former Congolese child miners who sued the aforementioned tech companies for supporting child labour.

Further, the US used uranium mined in the DRC to create nuclear bombs that k*lled hundreds of thousands of Japanese during World War II.

Sources

https://apnews.com/article/who-is-abrego-garcia-e1b2af6528f915a1f0ec60f9a1c73cdd

https://earth.org/cobalt-mining-in-congo

https://fnl.mit.edu/january-february-2021/the-legacy-of-the-involvement-of-the-democratic-republic-of-the-congo-in-the-bombs-dropped-on-hiroshima-and-nagasaki

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-50812616

https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-appeals-court-dismisses-child-labor-case-against-tech-companies-2024-03-05

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/03/16/politics/donald-trump-congo-release-prisoners-immigration/index.html