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TRUMP’S FLAGRANT RACISM  
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Robert Kuttner
May 13, 2025
The American Prospect
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_ It’s the flip side of Trump’s DEI for incompetent white people.
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A Maryland man speaks to a reporter while waiting in the arrivals
area for white South African “refugees” to arrive at Washington
Dulles International Airport in Virginia, May 12, 2025., Allison
Bailey/NurPhoto via AP

 

Several weeks ago, the _Prospect_ ran a feature article of mine
pointing out that Trump’s war on DEI was a cover for simple racism
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It was a thinly disguised excuse to assume that any Black official
must have gotten the job because of racial preferences, and thus to
discriminate explicitly against Blacks.

I actually understated Trump’s evil and cynicism. Last week, Trump
abruptly fired the Librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden, a Black
librarian of national distinction. Hayden’s term appointment had
another year to run, making the dismissal illegal as well.

Hayden previously served as head of the public library systems of
Chicago and Baltimore, and as president of the American Library
Association. When she was appointed in 2016 by President Obama, more
than 140 library, publishing, educational, and academic organizations
signed a letter of support. The Senate confirmed her 74 to 18, with
most Republicans voting to confirm.

The post is not a partisan position. Nobody in the Republican-led
Congress had sought Hayden’s dismissal. It was pure Trump.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt
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in a stunning display of either ignorance or pure BS, told reporters
Friday that Hayden had been “putting inappropriate books in the
library for children.” The Library of Congress does not lend books
to children, or indeed to adults.

Here’s the irony. Trump has been on a rampage of DEI _for
unqualified white people_. Does it get more unqualified than RFK Jr.,
or Pete Hegseth?

By comparison, the Black appointees whom Trump has fired, as alleged
DEI hires, are more than eminently qualified. You could imagine a
_Saturday Night Live_ sketch on Trump DEI for incompetent whites.

Occasionally, there are Black folks of dubious qualifications who got
their positions due to racial preferences—but that isn’t just, or
even mainly, for Democrats. Clarence Thomas would lead such a list,
and Herschel Walker would end it. The Republican right gives them a
pass.

Trump has also disingenuously posed as a champion of Jews
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the better to assault liberal institutions such as universities and to
divert civil rights enforcement away from Blacks, women, sexual
minorities, and others who have suffered more vicious discrimination,
and to pressure Jews to be 100 percent defenders of Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. This unholy alliance will come back to
haunt Jews.

Just to rub it in, Trump, the relentless scourge of the world’s
refugees, has made an exception for one country, actually for one
ethnic group in one country. That would be Afrikaners, a subsection of
the white minority in South Africa.

In February, Trump signed an executive order
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directing his government to slash aid to the South African government,
and to “promote the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping
government-sponsored race-based discrimination, including racially
discriminatory property confiscation.” So far, the U.S. has granted
special refugee status
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to 49 such Afrikaners, who arrived by charter flight in Washington
Monday afternoon and were welcomed by senior government officials, not
ICE agents. Trump created a special fast track for them.

The background for the alleged discrimination against these white
South Africans is, of course, the white colonization of South Africa,
the theft of tribal lands, and the sordid history of apartheid. Three
decades after apartheid ended, the multiracial South African
government has barely begun a modest program of land reform. After
several false starts since 1994, the share of private farmland owned
by white South Africans (who make up about 7 percent of the
population) has fallen by about a fifth
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though that still leaves them with about 78 percent of the total. Yet
even these efforts have been characterized as murderous. “It’s a
genocide that’s taking place,” Trump said
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at a recent press conference. “Farmers are being killed.”

All this is largely beside the point. Just as in the U.S., the vast
majority of Afrikaners are not farmers
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and a small handful of huge farms
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account for most of the sector. Most white South Africans even don’t
want to leave the place that is, according to the post-apartheid
settlement, their rightful homeland too. In March, the U.S. Embassy in
South Africa claimed it received a list of 67,000 white South Africans
interested
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in emigration, against a total population of about 4.5 million.
Indeed, conservative Afrikaner groups told _The Guardian_
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they were concerned about aid being cut off and Trump’s tariffs
harming their agricultural exports. In the end, Trump’s minions had
to scramble to recruit 49 alleged refugees.

Looking around the world, this is evidently the only worthy case for
refugees that Trump can find. The symbolism is deliberate and
appalling.

On his first day in office, Trump suspended the U.S. refugee
settlement
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program, stranding more than 100,000 people
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previously approved for resettlement who had fled war and persecution
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in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo and Afghanistan. Most
such refugees are nonwhite, from what Trump has delicately described
as shithole countries.

There is nothing dog-whistle about Trump’s racism. It is a shameless
bugle call.

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Robert Kuttner is co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect,
and professor at Brandeis University’s Heller School.

* Immigration; Refugees; Trump's Racism; DEI;
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