White grievance and straight up racism are the animating features of Trumpism. Donald Trump’s rise and rule can’t be understood without accepting that reality.
That’s why it was utterly predictable that the president would use Wednesday’s White House meeting with South Africa’s president to aggressively push the fiction that white farmers are the victims of a genocide being carried out by Black South Africans.
“We’ve had tremendous complaints about Africa, about other countries, too, from people,” said Trump, who showed the South African president a video clip of a fringe leader there calling for white-owned land to be given to Black residents. “They say there’s a lot of bad things going on in Africa. And that’s what we’re going to be discussing today.”
The video included what Trump described as the burial sites of “over a thousand” murdered white South Africans. None of it was true. Not the burial sites, which The New York Times reported was for a funeral procession for a single white couple that was killed. And not the “genocide,” which no credible agency has confirmed.
The “genocide” is a lie of breathtaking scope, one no president briefed by the world’s most sophisticated intelligence communities could espouse without understanding that he was lying.
Trump, however, misses no opportunity to take up the mantle of the aggrieved white man, who somehow believes himself to be at imminent risk of losing status and power. Despite being born to extraordinary wealth and privilege, Trump embraces that sense of victimhood, that belief that “others” - namely, Black people - are given unfair advantages and still complain about their lot.
This was the future president on NBC’s “Meet the Press” 1989: “A well-educated Black has a tremendous advantage over a well-educated white in terms of the job market. If I were starting off today, I would love to be a well-educated Black because I really do believe they have an actual advantage today.”
Why wouldn’t a man who embraces that lunacy NOT want to return to an earlier time in America when white men dominated everything everywhere and had no reason to sweat any “Black,” well-educated or not? Most political movements are forward-looking, but Trump’s is a sepia-shrouded look back to when white men were omnipotent and America was great.
The crowds who packed venues to hear candidate Trump speak didn’t do so in spite of that mindset. They did so because of it. And Trump, a truly gifted avatar, understands that pleasing his masses - and himself - means pointing out all of the instances when a white man was denied his due or made to feel bad for flexing his power.
So Trump makes a show of firing the Black Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and replacing him with a white man. Trump launches a sustained assault on diversity, equity and inclusion policies, believing they are a threat to white male dominance. His administration withdraws from reform agreements its predecessor made with police departments in Louisville and Minneapolis, both of which were the site of high-profile instances of Black people being killed by law enforcement. (No weak-kneed “reform” is needed if a police department routinely abuses the Black people it’s supposed to protect! White men can flex; it’s for others to fear.)
There are horrific scenes of mass violence actually taking place in this world. Trump reached for a fictional one in South Africa because it fits with the story he and many other white men tell themselves, one that has them as vulnerable victims. After all, if the focus is on that fiction, there would be no need, no justification, for programs and policies that lift up, protect and advance other people.