Trump’s Lie About Dead “White Farmers” Just Got Even More Grotesque

As I argued recently, Trump’s “white genocide” imagery draws heavily on a kind of internationalized “great replacement theory” that’s popular among white nationalists. In this storytelling, embattled white populations around the world must come to each other’s rescue to avoid elimination. The “farmers” trope gives all this a producerist feel: The white populations are the salt of the earth in their homelands, under siege from shiftless, rootless, swarthy masses being manipulated against them by dark international forces or even by the globalists themselves.

Trump, Miller, and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt don’t use this precise language. But they constantly describe white South Africans as a “persecuted minority”—even as they taunt us with their refusal to settle genuine victims of mass persecution from the rest of Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the Middle East. The flaunting of this contrast is itself the intended message.

The depravity of it all was perfectly captured by Reuters video journalist Djaffar Al Katanty, who shot the image Trump used. “In view of all the world,” Al Katanty said, Trump manipulated his work to broadcast the story that “white people are being killed by Black people.”