Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

Saner voices in the U.S. media have been appropriately appalled by President Trump referencing the word “genocide” while claiming that violent persecution of white farmers in South Africa was driving them to flee. This fact-indifferent accusation echoes, presumably deliberately, longstanding white supremacist narratives of “white genocide” in the U.S. and other Western countries. The rise of the MAGA movement had already mainstreamed some mildly subtler versions of these narratives (like “Great Replacement theory”), but this is the closest Trump himself has come to saying “white genocide” without using the exact two word phrase.

If Trump were anyone other than Trump, we might consider this rhetoric a curiously extreme enactment of reputational self-sabotage. It arguably exceeds the shameless racism even of his 2017 “very fine people on both sides” comment about the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville that turned deadly. Since he is Trump, though, being even more nakedly white supremacist will probably somehow work out to help him accumulate more power, wealth and lethal capacity. He has notably linked (a) his expressed white supremacy to (b) his concern for protecting Israel from South Africa’s accusations of genocide. Instead of the former tainting the latter, perhaps he expects the latter will put lipstick on the pig of the former. But the lipstick itself drips blood.

A review of Trump’s beef with South Africa, and the pro-Israel dimension of this beef

During Trump’s surreal White House meeting with South Africa’s president Cyril Ramaphosa, he went so far as dimming the lights to make his unhinged accusations more dramatically. This meeting intensified media attention on the administration’s determination to strain relations with post-Apartheid South Africa. Months earlier, Trump had made his intentions clear with his February 7th executive order to “(a) … not provide aid or assistance to South Africa; and (b) … promote the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination…”

The most interesting feature of the executive order, though, was the combination of reasons for issuing it. Section 1 of the order first references South Africa’s supposed “shocking disregard of its citizens’ rights” by having “enacted Expropriation Act 13 of 2024 (Act), to enable the government of South Africa to seize ethnic minority Afrikaners’ agricultural property without compensation.” This claim, as one might expect, grossly exaggerates the functional significance of a provision within South Africa’s bill

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