There is so much bad drama in the world, we don't need Dementia Donnie or Racist Mel creating more; however, both have.
Last week, President Trump issued Executive Order 14283 titled "White House Initiative To Promote Excellence and Innovation at Historically Black Colleges and Universities" (HBCUs). This seemingly favorable title hides an empty gesture in the guise of a well-meaning policy initiative. The truth is: this administration is dismantling diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives across the country, and the federal funding that HBCUs rely on for growth, innovation, and sustainability has been systematically eliminated.
Real investment and systemic support have been taken away, leaving behind an abundance of photo ops and catchphrases. Neither "racial equity" nor the historical inequities that HBCUs were established to address are mentioned in the Trump Administration's initiative. Instead, it engages in performative gestures intended to conceal policy decisions that have cost Black colleges and universities millions of dollars, resources that are essential to HBCUs' ability to remain pillars of excellence and opportunity for Black communities nationwide.
Derrick Johnson, President and CEO of the NAACP, said:
"The facts are clear: support for Black institutions cannot be measured by photo ops or public relations campaigns. We need policies that empower, safeguard, and invest in our communities. This executive order is nothing more than smoke and mirrors meant to divert attention away from the severe funding cuts and the larger struggle against equity and racial justice that HBCUs face. Slogans are not enough for Black America. We are worthy of genuine advancement."
The Trump Administration's record demonstrates a concerning trend of undermining the very foundations that HBCUs depend on to succeed, in contrast to initiatives undertaken under previous administrations that brought historic levels of federal funding and integrated HBCUs into larger equity strategies across the government.
Despite these inconsistencies, the NAACP will not remain silent. The Association will keep holding leaders responsible and advocating for real, long-term investments that respect HBCUs' history and future, not just in words, but in deeds.
Most obviously, this is another sign of Trump’s inability to produce evidence of his new pet conspiracy theory about huge masses of “white farmers” being killed in racial pogroms. But there’s another ugly irony here that shouldn’t pass unnoticed: The Trump administration has suspended foreign aid to Congo and the resettlement of refugees from that nation, thus abandoning countless victims of the very same real-life humanitarian catastrophe that he’s cherry-picking imagery from to portray an atrocity against whites that isn’t actually happening.
Plainly, a hapless Trump aide was tasked with finding web postings about murdered South African white farmers for Trump to wave in Ramaphosa’s face as part of some sort of humiliation ritual—probably dreamed up by Stephen Miller—designed to thrill white nationalists everywhere. As it happens, the video he showed Ramaphosa of crosses designed to depict a killing field full of white corpses also turned out to be a wild distortion.
Trump’s broader claim of a white genocide has similarly been debunked. Yet Trump has sought to feed this gutter conspiracy theory by resettling several dozen white Afrikaners in the United States, even as he’s suspended the resettlement of refugees from everywhere else in the world.
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As I argued recently, Trump’s “white genocide” imagery draws heavily on a kind of internationalized “great replacement theory” that’s popular among white nationalists. In this storytelling, embattled white populations around the world must come to each other’s rescue to avoid elimination. The “farmers” trope gives all this a producerist feel: The white populations are the salt of the earth in their homelands, under siege from shiftless, rootless, swarthy masses being manipulated against them by dark international forces or even by the globalists themselves.
Trump, Miller, and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt don’t use this precise language. But they constantly describe white South Africans as a “persecuted minority”—even as they taunt us with their refusal to settle genuine victims of mass persecution from the rest of Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the Middle East. The flaunting of this contrast is itself the intended message.
The depravity of it all was perfectly captured by Reuters video journalist Djaffar Al Katanty, who shot the image Trump used. “In view of all the world,” Al Katanty said, Trump manipulated his work to broadcast the story that “white people are being killed by Black people.”
The not-so-coded message is that the only victims of mass historical crimes who exist or merit our attention are white victims of nonwhites. All the rest will be summarily erased as matters of concern to us. The unabashed declaration of the power to replace actual historical crimes with mythological ones—ones featuring whites as world-historical victims—is the main event here.
