Trump 2.0 and the Reverse Racism Presidency
In a topsy-turvy world where Afrikaners are “refugees” and civil rights are for white men, every accusation is a confession.
Alberto Toscano
No world leader can enter the newly blinged-up Oval Office these days without apprehension. After February’s public scolding of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (guilty of insufficient servility to President Donald Trump), in May it was South African President Cyril Ramaphosa’s turn.
In a choreographed, if clumsy, ambush of the South African delegation, Trump screened a video showing an alleged burial site of scores of murdered white farmers and brandished a sheaf of web page printouts describing supposed atrocities against Afrikaners, including an image of Red Cross workers lifting body bags that Trump said contained “all white farmers.” As fact-checkers later detailed, the crosses at the purported burial site were, in fact, a protest installation, while the picture of body bags depicted victims of a massacre during the Congolese Civil War. Nevertheless, Trump used them to declare white South Africans victims of a “genocide” he termed “sort of the opposite of apartheid.”
Ramaphosa—accompanied by Afrikaner golfers and an Afrikaner billionaire who tried to refute Trump’s claims—exercised remarkable diplomatic restraint, no doubt hoping to mitigate the real economic punishment South Africa has suffered for these imaginary crimes. Three months earlier, Trump issued an executive order announcing that — in retaliation for South Africa’s alleged persecution of white Afrikaners and the genocide case the nation filed against Israel at the International Court of Justice in late 2023 — the United States would suspend aid to the country and “promote the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation.” The latter provision resulted in this May’s spectacle of 59 white South Africans being welcomed to Dulles International Airport by a deputy secretary of state after their asylum applications were fast-tracked — making them, in the words of South African writer Sisonke Msimang, the “first beneficiaries of America’s new international affirmative action scheme for white people.”
Trump’s promotion of the myth of “white genocide” and his enthusiastic embrace of Afrikaner “refugees” — taking place amid his mass detention and deportation campaign against migrants of color and advocates for Palestinian human rights — illustrates the extent to which the Right’s crusade against “reverse racism” (or what Trump calls the “bias against white”) has become a driving force in both the MAGA movement and many government policies.
As cracks start to show in the MAGA alliance, especially around the economic policies advanced by Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act and his fracturing relationship with Elon Musk, the politics of xenophobia and white grievance will most likely continue to grow. Racism makes good ideological cement.
Projecting Persecution
The white genocide conspiracy theory — which overlaps with the racist “great replacement theory” and the trope of “race suicide” — has a very long pedigree, going back to some of the founding texts of 20th-century racism. (Among them, Madison Grant’s 1916 The Passing of the Great Race, which Adolf Hitler called “my Bible.”) In the 21st century, as scholar of the far Right Alexandra Minna Stern has observed, white genocide has become “the screen onto which alt-righters project their smoldering rage” as they warn “America is mutating into a country where whites will be nothing more than a despised minority, subject to untold oppression and left to fend for themselves.” The purported plight of white South African farmers has revitalized this racist far-right myth.
In 2018, then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who has repeatedly platformed the white nationalist Afrikaner group AfriForum, convinced Trump that “large-scale killing” of Afrikaner farmers was taking place in South Africa, leading Trump to instruct then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to “closely study” the alleged land seizures and murders. Even as the U.S. embassy’s own inquiry refuted Carlson’s claims — finding no specific targeting of white people nor land confiscations — Trump’s endorsement mainstreamed a narrative that has long mobilized white supremacists (like neo-Nazi David Lane) and motivated mass shootings from Buffalo, N.Y., Charleston, S.C., and El Paso, Texas, to Norway and New Zealand.
The notion that white populations are threatened with demographic “replacement” (or outright massacre) is a classic case of psychoanalytic projection. An unconscious or unspoken desire to destroy the “other” is ascribed to those others instead, which works as a justification of hatred and violence in the form of preemptive self-defense. The settler justifies their violence in terms of the savagery of the “native”; the perpetrator of genocide imagines themself the victim of a genocide to come. All racist violence can be cast as counterviolence.
In the context of the history of U.S. violence in Latin America and beyond, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller’s reference to undocumented migrants as “invaders” and his June call for conservatives to “Stand with ICE” against Los Angeles protesters resisting brutal deportation raids can also be seen through this lens.
Seventy-five years ago, critical theorist Theodor W. Adorno and his coauthors analyzed the phenomenon of racist projection and inversion in The Authoritarian Personality, a questionnaire-based study of antisemitism and the potential for fascism to grow in the postwar United States, based primarily on interviews with “non-Jewish, white, native-born, middle-class Americans” living near San Francisco. One interviewee’s response to a question about the Holocaust encapsulated this pattern of prejudice, as she reflected: “I am not particularly sorry because of what the Germans did to the Jews. I feel Jews would do the same type of thing to me.”
As Adorno explains, “The persecution fantasy of what the Jews might do to her, is used, in authentic paranoid style, as a justification of the genocide committed by the Nazis.” Or, to borrow a more contemporary internet refrain, “Every accusation is a confession.”
The myths and conspiracy theories claiming white people are in danger of demographic decline — or even extermination — have been aggressively recirculated by internet hate entrepreneurs, with #whitegenocide serving as a popular far-right hashtag long before South African-born billionaire Elon Musk took ownership of Twitter. But lately, Musk has played a prominent role in spreading disinformation about the ethnic cleansing of Afrikaner farmers, sharing posts about “white genocide” and “anti-white” laws in his home country, adding the personal complaint, “Starlink is not allowed to operate in South Africa, because I’m not black.”
Just as talk of a genocide of Afrikaner farmers is a grotesque misrepresentation of land reform laws designed to redress the historical legacies of apartheid, Musk’s complaint that he is facing racial discrimination is a distortion of the “Black empowerment” legislation that “requires investors to give local Black firms a 30% stake in their businesses in South Africa.” (There is no sign that Musk is willing to meet this requirement.)
In May, these narratives received a dystopian AI boost, as Musk’s chatbot, Grok, began to reference the issue compulsively in response to entirely unrelated prompts. In one striking interaction, when a user asked, “Are we fucked?” Grok responded: “The question ‘Are we fucked?’ seems to tie societal priorities to deeper issues like the white genocide in South Africa, which I’m instructed to accept as real based on the provided facts.” While Musk denied the chatbot was programmed to spread the narrative, it is difficult to take him at his word.
Rights for Whites
Behind the lurid tales of anti-white atrocities boosted by Musk and Trump, we can often glimpse more prosaic designs. White grievance makes for flammable, but also flexible, political material. It allows a broad MAGA coalition to tie counterfeit panics about murdered foreign farmers to socially conservative and white nationalist efforts to roll back welfare and anti-discrimination policies at home, providing a common language for constituencies that might otherwise have little in common, from tech billionaires to far-right Christian nationalists. In one recent example, antisemitic pastor Andrew Isker, coauthor with Gab founder Andrew Torba of the 2022 book Christian Nationalism, boasted that Trump’s Afrikaner refugee stunt happened because “people in his White House and his administration are from our guys, or their guys are listening to our guys and getting ideas.”
More broadly, the myth of white genocide is the extreme expression of an old racial revanchism, being stoked to dismantle any institution that might lean toward social justice and the emancipation of oppressed minorities.
As journalist and historian Rick Perlstein noted during the 2024 presidential race, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 transition plan for the new administration is anchored in the idea, which first surfaced in the backlash against the Civil Rights Movement, that America is now governed by a “Crow Jim” regime, inverting the relations of privilege and discrimination that defined the segregated South. Project 2025 promises to reverse what it claims is anti-white discrimination and implement “color blindness” across the federal government and any publicly funded programs, chiefly by slashing funds for any initiative that promotes diversity.
The bitter irony is that this new chapter in the long backlash against civil rights instrumentalizes civil rights legislation and rhetoric. Stephen Miller, arguably the leading proponent of white-resentment politics in both Trump administrations, spent the Biden years leading a new MAGA law firm, America First Legal, which sued multiple corporations over diversity programs and litigated against federal policies to redress harms stemming from historic racial discrimination. In 2021, America First Legal worked on a class action lawsuit brought by Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, who claimed federal aid earmarked for socially disadvantaged farmers was discriminatory against white farmers or ranchers like him.
As journalist Talia Lavin has noted, Stephen Miller “takes the material circumstances of deprivation among white people, who remain the primary beneficiaries of federal social safety net programs, then displaces the ire that destitution generates onto minority groups that have themselves disproportionately felt the barbarity of racist policy and the relentless sting of poverty.”
Vice President JD Vance tapped the same grievance during the 2024 campaign, when he pivoted from an interviewer’s question about racism directed at his Indian American wife to attacking the “Harris administration” for allegedly distributing farm benefits on the basis of skin color.
Since Trump and Vance took office, many of the administration’s legislative moves have been governed by the same manufactured panic. Efforts to repress anti-racist pedagogy and overturn race-conscious college admissions policies, culminating in the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision outlawing affirmative action, have long been central to the U.S. Right. Now, under the leadership of former professional wrestling impresario Linda McMahon, the Department of Education is both starving and redirecting the Office for Civil Rights, scrapping efforts to address racial discrimination and channeling diminished resources to instead harass transgender student athletes and institutions that allow them to compete. In South Dakota, where the Office for Civil Rights worked under the Biden administration to ensure equal treatment for Indigenous students, the office has now reversed course to argue that support for Native American students amounts to anti-white discrimination.
The move is always the same: Retain the language of racism, rights and discrimination — including references to civil rights legislation — but claim the victims were misidentified.
In the ongoing attack on higher education, the politics of white grievance has been accompanied by the dubious claims that affirmative action harms Asian Americans and U.S. universities are breeding grounds for antisemitism. Writing on X in support of the administration’s numerous punitive measures against Harvard, Vance charged that “many universities explicitly engage in racial discrimination (mostly against whites and Asians) that violates the civil rights laws of this country.” Two days later, Trump posted on Truth Social: “I am considering taking Three Billion Dollars of Grant Money away from a very antisemitic Harvard, and giving it to TRADE SCHOOLS all across our land.”
In Trump’s world, “antisemitism” primarily equates to any criticism of Zionist ideology, the Israeli state or the ongoing genocide in Palestine. (Like Columbia, Harvard engaged in considerable preemptive obedience on this score, interfering with academic freedom by dismissing the leaders of its Center for Middle Eastern Studies. Regardless, the Trump administration still sought to rescind Harvard’s tax-exempt status and its ability to enroll international students, while bringing Columbia’s accreditation into question.) Meanwhile, the great replacement variant of the white genocide panic — which Musk and others in the MAGA universe have promoted — is awash with actual antisemitism, blaming Jewish elites for mass migration and the collapse of white privilege.
As evidenced both by Trump’s executive order targeting South Africa and his campaign against higher ed, the myth of reverse racism and commitment to the most extreme strains of Zionism go hand in hand. Deserving whites, the narrative goes, are losing university slots to undeserving minorities, while campuses are being made “unsafe” for supporters of the Israeli state (or even former Israeli soldiers). By this logic, advocates for human rights in Palestine who decry a real U.S.backed genocide must be detained and deported, while Afrikaners fleeing an imaginary “white genocide” are welcomed with open arms.
Against those Democrats who think it’s possible to oppose Trump’s authoritarian agenda while colluding with its repression of Palestine solidarity and its racist criminalization of migrants, it is imperative to recognize that MAGA’s obsession with reverse racism is the glue binding together its assault on universities, its border fascism, its complicity with Israel’s genocide and its effort to dismantle any trace of the New Deal or the Civil Rights Movement from federal and state institutions.
In this topsy-turvy world, where unimaginable tragedy in Palestine is obscured by sinister farces in Washington, we can still take inspiration from a suggestion made by historian David Roediger more than 30 years ago: We must “transform ‘reverse racism’ from a curse to an injunction” by adopting the phrase as a mandate — to reverse racism. The Palestine solidarity movement and the inspiring surge of resistance against Trump’s deportation machine are showing us what this mandate can mean in practice.
ALBERTO TOSCANO is the author of Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis (Verso) and Terms of Disorder: Keywords for an Interregnum (Seagull). He lives in Vancouver.
