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Several sources at non-governmental organizations tell me they’ve heard directly from administration officials that the government’s refugee resettlement agencies were prodded by top administration people to fast-track the resettlement of Afrikaners in particular. “They have been under intense political pressure to pull out all the stops to get Afrikaners here as rapidly as possible,” one of the sources says.

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You can see this sordid game in their public theatrics. “What’s happening in South Africa fits the textbook definition of why the refugee program was created,” Miller said. “This is race-based persecution.” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, meanwhile, lamented the “suffering” of “Afrikaner refugees,” describing them as a “long-persecuted minority group.”

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It’s unclear when Trump decided that white Afrikaners are suffering “genocide.” But the Times reports that Trump has been privately saying since the 1990s that South Africa is a cautionary tale for the United States, which should avoid letting nonwhites become the majority. In 2018, after Tucker Carlson did a segment on South Africa, Trump tweeted that “white farmers” face rampant discrimination, land seizures, and “large scale killing.”

Here Trump is trafficking in a kind of internationalized version of great replacement theory. It’s an obsession, one that has long festered on the white nationalist far right, with the fate of supposedly embattled white populations around the world that must rally to each other’s aid to avoid eventual extinction. South Africa’s “white farmers” have become a kind of totem for this cause, a symbol of this broader demographic “plight.”

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