Hans Christian Andersen had Donald Trump down to a T, his The Emperor’s New Clothes a perfect metaphor for the Trump age and the new diplomacy of sycophancy. The thin-skinned emperor, convinced of his own genius, flourishes in his nakedness as leaders the world over – pace Micheál Martin – lavish him with insincere flattery that reinforces the overweening self-esteem.
Woe betide anyone who, like the small boy in Andersen’s tale, suggests “the emperor has no clothes”.
Last Friday, secretary of state Marco Rubio kicked out South Africa’s ambassador to the US, Ebrahim Rasool. In an X post, Trump declared him (in capitals of course), “PERSONA NON GRATA”. His offence, Rubio said, was being a “race-bating politician who hates America” for telling a webinar Trump “is leading a white supremacist movement in America and around the world”.
Less than three weeks in office Trump – apparently encouraged by his best mate, the South-African-born Elon Musk – specifically singled out the country with a two-pronged executive order, “Addressing Egregious Actions of the Republic of South Africa”. The order excoriated South Africa’s referral of Israel to the International Criminal Court for war crimes in Gaza, and alleged that it was involved in a murderous campaign against white farmers and the expropriation of white-owned farms through a new land reform act.
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Musk, the world’s richest man, has been engaged in a long battle with Pretoria over his business interests. He repeatedly attacks it for “racialist” laws and practices. He claims that it is “openly pushing for genocide of white people” and is demanding exemption for his Starlink, a satellite internet communications business, from regulations requiring foreign investors in the country’s telecoms sector to provide a third of the equity in the South African part of the enterprise to black-owned businesses.
Trump immediately cut off all aid to the country, $453 million (€418 million). This included vital assistance to the country’s Aids programme, the largest in Africa, and support for HIV organisations funded by the US P resident George W Bush’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (Pepfar). Studies predict more than half a million unnecessary deaths will result.
Pretoria also fears it will lose market access privileges under the US African Growth and Opportunity Act, damaging its car and farming industry.
Breaking with his long-standing virulent opposition to the accommodation of refugees, Trump also announced a special programme for Afrikaners – descendants of mainly Dutch settlers who arrived in the 17th Century – “victims of unjust racial discrimination”, to resettle in he US. He posted that “any farmer (with family!) from South Africa, seeking to flee that country for reasons of safety, will be invited into the US with a rapid pathway to citizenship”.
He has long supported far-right conspiracy theories that falsely claim white farmers in South Africa are subject to a government-backed campaign of violence. In August 2018, he asked then-secretary of state Mike Pompeo “to closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large-scale killing of farmers”.
Yet the legacy of apartheid is such that a 2017 government land audit found that white people, 9 per cent of the population, still own approximately 72 per cent of privately owned farmland. The new Expropriation Act is intended to address such inequalities. It permits expropriation only in exceptional circumstances, such as unused abandoned land, and generally requires “just and equitable” compensation. The government insists it is similar to legislation in most western countries.
And white South African farmer deaths are mostly the result of the country’s high crime rate – more than 27,000 murders overall between March 2023 and March 2024 – which affects all segments of the population. An average of about 50 have occurred on farms each year over the past decade, accounting for less than 0.2 per cent of total homicides. Nor have the families of any murdered farmers then had their land confiscated. In a ruling handed down in mid-February, a South African magistrate described the notion of “white genocide” in the country as “clearly imagined”.
But there is also a strong racist, domestic dimension to Trump’s waving of the Afrikaner flag. In the spirit of Trump’s trashing of US diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) programmes, claiming they promote anti-white discrimination and incompetence, Rubio refused last month to attend a G20 meeting because the current presidency, South Africa, had its focus on “solidarity, equality and sustainability”.
The rebranding of Afrikaners as victims has great dog-whistle resonance among the American far-right, says Max du Preez, an Afrikaner writer and historian, who founded the first anti-apartheid newspaper in Afrikaans. “They’re playing on the thing of the white Christian civilisation being threatened,” he argues. “And that has a lot of appeal among the evangelicals and others in the US.”
When Trump or Musk talk about the murders of white farmers, they’re sending a signal to nationalist Maga supporters that they care explicitly about white nationalism around the world. Which is exactly what Rasool tried to say. The emperor has no clothes.
