On Trump’s Bullshit: The 'White Genocide' That Isn’t

He’s revived a racist conspiracy about South Africa to justify slashing refugee admissions — and favoring White immigrants.

When South African President Cyril Ramaphosa visited the Oval Office in May, Trump ambushed him with false information.

Thirteenth in the series, “On Trump’s Bullshit.” The first was published Aug. 21, and subsequent essays are for paid subscribers.

When the late Harry Frankfurt, author of On Bullshit, assessed Donald Trump as the epitome of a bullshitter, he offered as an example Trump’s pledge in 2016 to deport all 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. He noted that Trump didn’t have any plan to do so, or any means to carry it out.

It was all for the optics, Frankfurt wrote: “He most likely made that pronouncement merely in order to create certain expectations and impressions in the minds of his listeners. He wanted people to think of him as a person who would settle upon and carry out intentions like the one he declared to be his.”

Of course, Trump never came close to deporting all undocumented immigrants in his first term. According to the Migration Policy Institute, he deported 1.5 million undocumented immigrants — about the same as Joe Biden during his term.

Now, in his second term, Trump has set a goal of 1 million deportations in his first year, with an arrest quota of 3,000 people a day.

As I previously documented, the 1-million goal appears to have been inspired by an Eisenhower falsehood about a publicity effort in the 1950s dubbed “Operation Wetback.” (The offensive name, a disparaging term for Mexicans who crossed the southern border through the Rio Grande, reflects the casual racism of that era.)

Eisenhower never came close to the figure of 1 million. Trump is also falling short.

While the administration claims 600,000 undocumented immigrants have been deported through September, its numbers are suspect. Data collected by the independent Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse finds that, for all the high-profile arrests posted on social media, Trump’s daily deportation rates lag Biden’s — and the daily arrest figure is about 1,000, far below the 3,000 goal. Just as in the Eisenhower administration, the publicity about the arrests — and the cruel way in which they are implemented — is designed to strike fear.

This is just one of the many examples of Trump’s bullshit about immigration. The litany of lies is too numerous to catalog: He falsely says illegal immigrants bring crime (there is little evidence to support this) and rattles off statistics (Biden released 13,000 “alien murderers”) that are invented, false and misleading. He seizes on tragic anecdotes — people murdered by an undocumented immigrant — while ignoring the data that puts such crimes in context.

As always with Trump, the facts don’t matter. His political base is animated by the issue of illegal immigration, so he will offer a constant stream of outrage and exaggerated achievements to keep his base’s support. For this installment of my series, I am going to focus on a conspiracy theory that Trump has embraced that is having real-life consequences for tens of thousands of people around the world — that there’s a “genocide” of White farmers in South Africa.