Trump endorses white nationalist theory
Critics blast tweets about farmer murders, expropriations of land
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s promotion of a white nationalist conspiracy theory involving South Africa prompted fierce backlash there Thursday and fresh criticism in the United States that he is compromising American foreign policy to stoke his far-right political base.
Former U.S. diplomats and South African leaders denounced Trump’s declaration in a tweet late Wednesday that he had instructed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to monitor the “large scale killing” of white farmers and the government’s expropriations of their land.
White nationalist groups have for years spread false claims about the murder rates, which have been widely debunked. Local police data show the number of people murdered on farms has dropped by half over the past two decades — from 140 in 2001-02 to 74 in 2016-17, according to the Associated Press.
Trump’s tweet appeared to come in response to a segment on Fox News in which host Tucker Carlson railed against a plan from South Africa’s ruling party to pursue constitutional changes allowing the government to redistribute land without compensation. The measure is designed to redress racial inequalities that have persisted nearly a quarter-century after the end of apartheid in 1994.
White nationalists in the United States and South Africa, where a fringe group called Afriforum has advanced the conspiracy theory, hailed the president’s remarks. Mike Peinovich, a far-right podcast host, called Trump’s endorsement “very big” and said “this is how we slowly chip away at the all-consuming anti-white discourse.”
Critics lambasted the president for endorsing the conspiracy theory to his 54 million Twitter followers. Patrick Gaspard, who served as U.S. ambassador to South Africa under President Barack Obama, noted that this marked the first time Trump mentioned that continent on Twitter since he took office.
“He uses the occasion to lift a white supremacist meme from the darkest place he can find,” Gaspard, now president of Open Society Foundations, said in an interview. “So many of my friends in South Africa are bewildered that a modern president of the United States, instead of leaning into issues of constitutionalism and jurisprudence, lifts up these themes. It’s dangerous and poisoned.”
The president’s tweet about South Africa marked his latest bid to signal common cause with nationalists movements abroad, including in Europe, where Trump and his top aides have expressed solidarity with populist governments pursuing anti-immigration agendas.
Trump has not visited Africa since taking office, although first lady Melania Trump announced this week she will visit the continent in October for her first major solo trip.
“President Trump’s unfortunate tweet in response to a Fox News broadcast should not distract the United States from improving relations with South Africa,” Sens. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., and Christopher Coons, D-Del., members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a joint statement. “We care deeply about the United States’ relationships with all African countries. Constructive relationships require measured dialogue as opposed to arbitrary tweets.”
The complicated issue land expropriation has been fraught with emotion in South Africa, whose leaders quickly sought to staunch the enthusiasm of the far-right over Trump’s tweet.
Government officials said they would summon U.S. diplomats to explain the Trump administration’s position, although Trump has yet to name an ambassador to the country.
“We would like to discourage those who are using this sensitive and emotive issue of land to divide us as South Africans by distorting our land reform measures to the international community and spreading falsehoods that our ‘white farmers’ are facing the onslaught from their own government,” David Mabuza, South Africa’s deputy president, attending a land summit in Limpopo, said. “This is far from the truth.”
In a media briefing in Johannesburg, Julius Malema, the head of South Africa’s far-left EFF party, said: “We are more determined, after the Donald Trump tweet, to expropriate land without compensation. … There’s no white genocide here. There is black genocide in the USA.”
At the State Department, spokeswoman Heather Nauert confirmed that Trump and Pompeo discussed South Africa and added that Pompeo promised the president he would review the matter of land being taken from white farmers.
In general, she said, “expropriation of land without compensation would not be a good thing,” and would send South Africa down the “wrong path.”