Amidst the slew of executive orders issued by US President Donald Trump—ranging from reinstating plastic straws, renaming the Gulf of Mexico, and proclaiming that only two genders exist—one, in particular, reverberated around braais, brandies-and-cokes, and bakkies from Brackenfell to Benoni: the executive order “Addressing Egregious Actions of the Republic of South Africa,” which included the policy that the “United States shall not provide aid or assistance to South Africa” and that the “United States shall promote the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation.”

The reaction to the announcement that Afrikaners—historically beneficiaries of the policy of apartheid, which included the most egregious state-sponsored dispossession and disenfranchisement—would now themselves be branded as refugees, ranged from ridicule to enthusiasm. Among Trump’s considerable support base among conservative Afrikaners, there was a smug elation following what they read as a recognition of their complaints that they were being threatened, marginalized, and at risk of losing their land. These complaints had particularly been fanned and promoted in recent years by the Afrikaner rights group AfriForum, who had been pushing a white genocide narrative for many years. Representatives of AfriForum had visited Washington, where they met Republican officials, appeared on conservative media outlets like The Tucker Carlson Show, and also extended their roadshows to conservative think tanks and conferences in Europe, like CPAC in Hungary. Here, they painted a dire picture of a South Africa where white farmers are under constant attack, on the verge of losing their ancestral land, and unfairly targeted by a corrupt and totalitarian government that discriminates against them in a type of reverse apartheid. Their deft communication strategy found sympathetic ears among US conservatives, and with Trump’s reelection, this campaign finally paid off. The White House’s justifications for the executive order read almost like an AfriForum press release and it is clear that AfriForum’s white victimhood discourse heavily influenced the Trump administration’s rhetoric and rationale. 

Within South Africa—outside of the conservative minority of Trump supporters—the executive order met with responses ranging from ridicule to disgust. The government, political parties, and civil society groups have condemned it as a misrepresentation of South African policies and social realities. Faced with the strong backlash, AfriForum rejected Trump’s offer and said they remain committed to the country, but blamed the ANC government for the White House’s animosity.  

But the executive order to fast-track refugee status to Afrikaners is anything but a humanitarian gesture from the White House. Instead, it aligns with the US president’s ideological playbook and political needs. Domestically, he has long thrived on stoking fears of “invasion” or cultural displacement—usually targeting immigrants of color. It is doubtful that Trump really knows or cares that much about South African farmers in particular. It is instead a cynical move to energize his right-wing base with a racialized narrative: casting himself as the defender of embattled white people against a supposedly vengeful black majority. This allows Trump to appeal to nativist conservatives who normally disdain refugee admissions but will make an exception when the refugees in question are white and Christian. South Africa is providing him with a convenient case study to support his talking points about the dangers of “woke” policies and the need to protect Western civilization. By offering sanctuary to Afrikaners, Trump signals that his America will serve as a haven for those who look and think like his core voters, even as it slams the door on others. 

Geopolitically, the executive order plays into Trump’s nationalistic ideology and supports his objectives of isolating adversaries. The order juxtaposes a purported defense of a white South African minority with a reaffirmation of the US’s support for Israel. It condemns South Africa’s “aggressive positions towards the United States and its allies, including accusing Israel, not Hamas, of genocide in the International Court of Justice.” Trump clearly wants to be seen as punishing South Africa for bringing a case against Israel. In this regard, Afrikaner farmers are used as pawns in a much bigger geopolitical game. The irony of creating a fake class of refugees at the same time as suggesting that Gazans become refugees in neighboring countries because Israel, with the support of the US, turned the Gaza strip into a “demolition site” would not have escaped South Africans demanding justice for Palestinians. 

Trump’s executive order, the campaign building up to it, and the response it elicited is, perhaps, first and foremost, a media event. The daily signing of a stack of leather-bound orders piled on the Resolute desk in the White House, is staged for the media to transmit the semiotic weight of power, determination and clarity of purpose. But Trump is no friend of the news media. On his own Truth Social platform, Trump referred to what he deems “a bad situation that the Radical Left Media doesn’t want to so much as mention.” This invocation of the “radical left media” is another signal to his base—his hostility to the press is well-known. During his previous campaign he repeatedly criticized the so-called fake news media and attacked journalists. By labeling the media as “radical” and “left” it makes it easy for him to delegitimize media criticism among his base, which has been primed to reject anything that is “left” or “woke.”

In South Africa, the media have also played a significant role in setting the agenda around farm murders and amplifying AfriForum’s campaigns. Even if support for the movement varies across outlets—most positive, of course, in the media outlet Maroela Media, established by Afriforum and its umbrella body Solidariteit—the movement has routinely been referred to as a “civil rights organization” instead of an Afrikaner-rights organization, and its statements and campaigns enjoyed widespread media coverage. Farm murders also attract coverage from a media that tends to attach more significance to white deaths than black ones. Afrikaans media, in particular, have, over many years, contributed to a victim narrative, constructing their readers as a people under siege. The organization is also very adept at using social media. Although they now deny having influenced the US president, AfriForum seems to have forgotten how they bragged on social media about their attempts to “garner support and lobby against racist theft” since 2018. 

Related to media coverage is the issue of disinformation. The South African government has expressed concern about what it termed Trump’s “campaign of misinformation and propaganda aimed at misrepresenting our great nation.” Not only has not a single piece of land been expropriated without compensation by the democratic government since 1994, but the act has not yet come into operation and will be subject to the Constitution. Ironically, in pointing out the misinformation, the ANC is now forced to admit the pace of land reform has been very slow. The idea that white Afrikaners are particularly singled out for violent crime is also false, even though it is a prevailing narrative in emotive arguments about a purported white genocide, including posts on X by Trump’s sidekick, the billionaire Elon Musk, whose white, privileged upbringing seems to keep informing his view of the country of his birth. Farm killings—violent and abhorrent as they may be—should be seen against the background of a massive crime problem in the country. Just last year, 27,000 people were killed, amounting to 45 people per 100,000. But statistics show that the murder crisis is even more acute for the country’s black majority, where homicides are more frequent but attract far less media coverage. Research indicates that while white South Africans make up around 8 percent of the population, they account for less than 2 percent of murder victims. None of these statistics resonate in Musk’s cheap shots at controversial politicians like Julius Malema, whose heated, theatrical rhetorical style is not that far removed from Trump’s own populist genre.

It has to be said, though, that although right-wing Afrikaner groups have been most vocal and visible in their attempts to push the white victimhood narratives, these ideas and attitudes are also present in some form in broader mainstream discourses, whether in formal politics (disillusionment among white voters has long been providing the Democratic Alliance with political capital, and they have already launched legal action against the Expropriation Bill) or the social class dynamics of suburban elites. It should also be noted that the majority of Afrikaans speakers are not white, and although AfriForum has attempted to co-opt “Coloured” communities, they do not share identical political attitudes.

If Trump had hoped for the executive order to extract subservience and attrition from South Africa, the response, by and large, has been the opposite. There is no question that US sanctions and discontinuation of aid will have a severe impact on the country’s economy and increase the misery of especially the poor black majority. If anything, this will damage US soft power in South Africa and lead South Africa to pursue its own strategic interests to a larger extent within the BRICS group of countries, and in particular China, which is already its largest trade partner. There has already been a decline in the positive perception of the US among South Africans, as Afrobarometer surveys have shown. The move may also have continent-wide resonance. The US can no longer rest on its laurels in the increasingly contested global media space on the continent, where it is competing with strategic narratives from China, Russia, Turkey, Iran, and other foreign powers seeking to influence public opinion. Already, studies show that anti-US, anti-imperialist, and possibly anti-West messaging resonates with a significant number of Angolans, Ethiopians, South Africans, and Zambians and that these attitudes are a strong predictor of support for Chinese and Russian narratives.

Trump’s executive order aimed at punishing South Africa may, therefore, in the long run, turn out to have more negative consequences for the US than having to welcome to its shores a group of white refugees with a victimhood complex.