“White genocide” and white guilt: Donald Trump versus history

It’s pointless to announce, at any given moment, that the second Trump administration has hit a new low. There’s always next week, and the likelihood of deeper and ever more painful absurdities: Drinking straws are causing gender confusion; many Americans are declining COVID boosters and therefore no Americans may have them; the price of eggs has fallen so far so fast that the supermarket now pays you. As I wrote a few months ago, we now seem devoted as a nation to acting out the thesis of Leonard Cohen’s final hit single, “You Want It Darker,” released the day before Donald Trump’s election in 2016.

Furthermore, in the face of a widening campaign of abduction and deportation conducted by masked, armed paramilitaries with no identifiable uniforms, Trump’s theatrical displays in the Oval Office can justifiably be viewed as irrelevant distractions. But still: For the president of the United States to accuse the government of South Africa, in 2025, of conducting a racial genocide is so craven, so shameless, that beggars any rational description. 

We are no longer at the level of right-wing conspiracy theory invading the body politic or contaminating government policy — admittedly, that’s been true for years. Trump’s assault on South African President Cyril Ramaphosa last week, featuring an insultingly clumsy propaganda video about that nation’s alleged “white genocide,” represented the triumph of paranoid racist projection as official White House doctrine. To inflict these delusional internet memes and outright fabrications on the elected leader of the nation that made “apartheid” a household word goes light-years beyond historical irony — it’s like an Upright Citizens Brigade comedy sketch that was rejected as overly cynical.

Indeed, the bottomless cynicism of the White House “white genocide” teachable moment strikes me as its most salient characteristic. Trump’s deployment of this far-right fantasy, which emerged in South Africa’s domestic politics about a decade ago and was laundered for American consumption, of course, by former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, had nothing to do with its nonexistent truth value or with the internal realities of contemporary South Africa.

It’s only feeding the flames to engage with what-abouters who will suggest that, gosh, maybe there are shreds of plausibility to Trump’s claims. Objective reality doesn’t matter to our president or the rest of the “do your own research” crowd; they either believe that it doesn’t exist at all or that it can be reshaped according to their whims. We can observe, however, that the South African “white genocide” narrative is categorically similar to the widespread perception that New York City has experienced an explosion of violent crime, and that the city’s subways are an anarchic wasteland. 

In other words, it’s entirely false and largely the product of media incompetence and public illiteracy. In both cases, a handful of traumatic incidents have come to symbolize dire but nonexistent trends. Admittedly, the underlying facts are quite different: After a brief pandemic spike, crime rates in New York have returned to near-historic lows, and violence in the subways is exceptionally rare. 

South Africa is another story, for reasons stemming from its troubled history. It remains a deeply divided society with extreme inequality (even by American standards) and high rates of violent crime, most of which occurs within impoverished Black communities. One Afrikaner organization claims that more than 2,300 farmers have been murdered over the last 35 years, which sounds alarming until you realize there were 26,000 reported murders in South Africa last year alone. Anytime a white farm family is attacked it makes headlines, but Black people, and especially Black women, are far more likely to be victims of violent crime.

Donald Trump, to be sure, neither knows nor cares whether his allegations have any basis in reality. His video was essentially a deepfake, and not a skillful one: It included a supposed graveyard for 1,000 farmers that was actually a memorial for two farmers, and news images of dead bodies from a conflict thousands of miles away in the Democratic Republic of Congo. 

No doubt the opportunity to humiliate a visiting Black head of state was a massive bonus, and to Ramaphosa’s credit — even if reviews back home were mixed — he remained largely dignified and managed to avoid the full Zelenskyy treatment. But South Africa’s leader was nothing more than a bit player in this tableau, while the white Afrikaners under supposed threat of extermination didn’t even get speaking parts. They were more like pathetic background extras, or bizarro-world inversions of the starving children from charity ads of bygone years: You can save Farmer Piet from white genocide, or you can turn the page.

In an essay for the Intercept unpacking the tangled backstory of the five dozen or so Afrikaners recently welcomed as refugees by the U.S., Sisonke Msimang expresses some (understandably conditional) compassion for their plight. These unexpected immigrants “represent the bottom rung of the Afrikaner socioeconomic ladder,” she writes, “those who have not been able to transition smoothly into post-apartheid South Africa without the protections that white skin privilege would have afforded them a generation ago.” They are, she concludes, “the first beneficiaries of America’s new international affirmative action scheme for white people.”

Trump’s true audience for this grotesque Oval Office charade was, as always, his own dismal horde of followers. This shabbily constructed myth about persecuted white people in a distant land was meant to serve as a “There! You see!” illustrative moment within a much larger narrative: The world has gone so badly off the rails that white people everywhere are disadvantaged, downtrodden and despised; needless to say, we have a great champion, and only he can fix it. What does it matter if the economy has been torpedoed by tariffs, the government has been demolished by wrecking ball and the supposedly sacred principles of the Constitution are blithely ignored? The white man is in big trouble!

The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be — will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.

That isn’t Trump talking, or Elon Musk or any of the loyalists who spend their days praising and parroting them on X. It certainly could be, but those of a literary bent will recognize the words of Tom Buchanan, the racist former athlete and cuckolded husband in “The Great Gatsby,” published just over 100 years ago. No advanced degree is required to perceive that Tom is a profoundly insecure person, disappointed with his life, anxious about his status and given to outbreaks of cruelty and violence. (Perhaps that reading is a product of the “woke mind virus”; then again, so is most of American literature.) 

However we define the profound sense of psychic injury that has rendered so many white Americans — and many other people of differing backgrounds scattered around the globe — so terrified of the contemporary world, so mesmerized by an imaginary past and so easily seduced by ludicrous fictions, it wasn’t invented this year or in this century. Tom’s anxiety about the future of “the white race” is articulated in the mid-1920s, very nearly the worst period of Jim Crow segregation and racism in America; two decades later, the Afrikaner-dominated National Party, inspired both by America’s example and the “race laws” of Nazi Germany, launched South Africa’s elaborate apartheid system.

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.

We can go a lot further back than Scott Fitzgerald without finding the lost golden age of mythological harmony and stability that Trumpist dreamers seem to imagine. Slaveowner statesmen of the antebellum South, like John C. Calhoun and Alexander Stephens, were plainly terrified of the racial apocalypse they feared might come with abolition, let alone any version of legal equality. 

Most of those who willingly inhale Trump’s “white genocide” lies wouldn’t say flat-out that they want to reinstate apartheid or Jim Crow or slavery. (There are certainly exceptions.) Even with the death of wokeness, it’s not quite OK to wish for such things openly, perhaps because of a dim awareness that there’s no escape from the paralyzing dynamic of racial fear. The present is always understood as an impending catastrophe in which white people will be killed en masse or “utterly submerged,” but there’s no discoverable or recoverable past moment when such fears were absent.

This soul-gnawing anxiety is not original sin in the Christian sense, even if it functions in much the same way. White people are not born with corrupted souls, contrary to the Nation of Islam’s doctrines. It’s more like a legacy of collective guilt, something we have repeatedly been assured is not passed down by the sins of our ancestors. Of course the Tom Buchanans and Donald Trumps of the world cannot be held responsible for crimes committed by others in the past. But they are responsible for refusing to face the truth about the past and for telling outrageous lies about the present. They live in constant fear of judgment.