South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, clearly doesn’t follow the news. He visited the Oval Office this past Wednesday just a few months after Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, received his public dressing down in front of the media. Yet the African leader was seemingly unaware that President Trump doesn’t believe in putting on a polite show for the cameras.

It was just one week after the arrival in the United States of 59 white refugees who seek protection from South Africa’s Black Economic Empowerment laws amid what they claim is a rash of targeted murders of white farmers. Mr. Ramaphosa seemed to believe he was at the White House to charm Mr. Trump and the American people with happy talk of friendship between the two countries and that avoiding a confrontation was an option.

Mr. Ramaphosa’s miscalculation became evident when Mr. Trump began leafing through pages of names of what he said were dead white South African farmers and screened his own homemade indie film featuring calls by some South Africans for the killing of the country’s Boer population. Things got only  worse when a white South African golfer, Retief Goosen, whom Mr. Ramaphosa brought along as his diversity shield, publicly confirmed that Mr. Trump’s concerns were merited.

The event became an indictment of Mr. Ramaphosa, who denied that South Africa practices racial discrimination and excuses racial violence. As he spoke, social media sleuths were posting clips of his own speeches calling for the seizure of white farmers’ land for redistribution to black citizens. Mr. Ramaphosa claimed he came to the White House to look to the future but was exposed as leading a government unwilling to move on from its past.

Poetically, Elon Musk stood silently in the room as a symbol of everything a backward-facing country riven by racial hatred stands to lose. Born in South Africa, Mr. Musk left for America at the age of 17, in part because he sensed the opportunities for growth weren’t going to be found in his country of birth.

He was right. His talents and potential were a mismatch for South Africa, as were those of a generation of young people who emigrated too, once they realized their government wouldn’t end racism, but rebrand it as justice and weaponize it against them.

Mr. Musk built businesses, created jobs, launched new technologies, and was assigned to run the Department of Government Efficiency. America is the beneficiary of his productivity and genius and, as Mr. Ramaphosa sat across from him last Wednesday, the African leader had to know that he was responsible for all the Elon Musks South Africa is still losing to countries that don’t tie their citizens’ fates to their skin color.

Mr. Ramaphosa wasn’t treated just to an alternative view of the present in South Africa when Mr. Trump dimmed the lights and pointed to the screen in the Oval Office — he was given a glimpse of South Africa’s bleak future if its policies don’t change. History is full of examples of nations that chased away disfavored populations in attempts to claim justice for the aggrieved. It never ends well.