US President Donald Trump gestures during a joint press conference with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the White House in Washington DC on February 13, 2025.
In June 2015, Donald J. Trump launched his first campaign for US President by attacking Mexicans and Latinos as rapists, drug dealers, and murderers. In the 1970s, Mr Trump was sanctioned by the Justice Department for systemic racism in his refusal to rent out his New York apartments to African-Americans.
Mr Trump took out a full-page advertisement in the New York Times to advocate for the death penalty against the Central Park Five, a group of African-American youth who had been falsely accused, and later wrongfully convicted, for allegedly attacking and killing a white female jogger in Central Park. Decades later, the five were fully exonerated. When people show you who they are, believe them. Mr Trump is a racist bigot.
Last week, I wrote about how Mr Trump, in a mere three weeks in office, has taken a wrecking ball to established American democratic institutions and traditions. He’s burning through the guardrails of the rule of law like a knife cuts through butter. Mr Trump is an intellectual midget, a simpleton who clutches on base and undigested ideas to mesmerise the hoi polloi and personalise power.
Adolf Hitler, the Nazi, propagated Aryan racial superiority to lead Germany into a catastrophic war in which millions and millions were killed. Mr Trump has a simple organising principle – White people have a manifest destiny to rule America and the world. Whites sit atop the hierarchy of all “other” races.
Haitian immigrants
This racial “philosophy” was evident in Mr Trump’s first term from 2016-2020. He stigmatised everyone who wasn’t White. Who can forget his remark that African and Black-ruled states were “s**thole” countries? In last year’s presidential campaign, Mr Trump repeatedly stated that Haitian immigrants in a small Ohio town were capturing and eating dogs and cats owned by Whites.
It was a flat-out lie and racist attack. Mr Trump has been an ardent and vitriolic opponent of the migration to the United States of black, brown, and Asian peoples from the Global South. To the contrary, he’s openly advocated for migrants from Norway, Sweden, and other European Whites. There’s no subtlety, or irony in Mr Trump’s racist views on immigration.
Mr Trump has, however, taken this racist “philosophy” a notch higher since he was sworn into office on January 20. He’s taken several stunning statements and actions. One such action is an executive order sanctioning South Africa for allegedly “taking” land owned by Afrikaners in violation of the law. He calls such taking discriminatory and oppressive to Afrikaners.
Mr Trump has offered Afrikaners and other South African Whites resettlement in the United States. He’s cut off American aid to South Africa. Just to be clear, Afrikaners, who still own the largest chunks of land in South Africa, took the land forcefully from Black South Africans and authored the racist policy of Apartheid. Today, Afrikaners live large after Apartheid was privatised in 1996.
It’s not rocket science to surmise that Mr Trump has been moved by Elon Musk, the South African-turned-American, who is the world’s richest man, and now a key adviser to Mr Trump. Mr Musk had been attacking South Africa’s land reform programme before Mr Trump brought the hammer down on Pretoria.
Mr Trump is quick on the draw to defend Whites wherever they are found in the Global South. In the case of South Africa, his concern isn’t with the millions of blacks who were dispossessed of their lands by Whites but with the White oppressors. I am glad that President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa has told Mr. Trump off and asked him to keep his racist hands off South Africa.
Mr Trump also sanctioned South Africa because of its position on Israel’s genocide in Gaza. There isn’t an iota of doubt in any reasonable person’s mind – including the overwhelming majority of lawyers worldwide – that Israel has committed genocide and other unspeakable acts against Palestinians in Gaza. It was South Africa that sued Israel for genocide at the International Court of Justice.
Racist colours
Mr Trump, showing his true racist colours, has blindly sided with Israel. The US sanctions against South Africa is a twofer – use one crude mallet to punish the country for seeking racial justice at home (land reform) and justice abroad (opposing Israeli genocide of Palestinians). In both cases, Mr Trump unabashedly sides with Whites over their Black and Arab victims.
It’s Mr Trump proposed plans in Gaza that have stupefied everyone. Standing next to Israel PM Benjamin Netanyahu – the author of the Palestinian genocide – at the White House, Mr Trump, without batting an eyelid, said that Palestinians should be ethnically cleansed from Gaza.
Get this – that the United States would empty Gaza of all Palestinians and relocate them to neighbouring Arab countries. A smiling Netanyahu immediately rushed back to Israeli whereupon his right-wing cabinet endorsed the American-led ethnic cleansing of Gaza. We are only in week four of the Second Coming of Mr Trump. Tighten your seat belts.
Makau Mutua is SUNY Distinguished Professor and Margaret W. Wong Professor at Buffalo Law School, The State University of New York. On X: @makaumutua.
