The cultural shades of Donald Trump’s America are darkening by the day. The new American culture is being actively shaped by MAGA’s racialised worldview – woven into its anti-immigration posture and its foreign policy, which now punishes South Africa for the baseless claim that white Afrikaners are being persecuted, and chastises Nigeria for Boko Haram’s kidnapping of schoolchildren because the victims were Christian. It is a worldview that treats the entire Third World as culpable for the killing of a National Guard soldier.

Trump has always conflated white-ness with America and never hesitated to insult, belittle and attack non-whites. Trump gained political prominence by claiming that Barack Obama had been born in Kenya and was a Muslim. He has spoken of immigrants from “shithole countries” for “poisoning the blood of America.”

The shooting of two National Guardsmen by an Afghan refugee in Washington, DC, has now become Trump’s pretext for unleashing the fullest version of his anti-immigrant agenda. In a Thanksgiving social-media post, he vowed to “permanently pause migration from all Third World countries,” threatened to strip naturalised citizens of their citizenship if they “undermine domestic tranquility,” and promised to deport foreigners deemed “non-compatible with Western civilisation.”

In the first part of the post he said most immigrants to the US were from “failed nations, or from prisons, mental institutions, gangs, or drug cartels. He launched a vicious attack on Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota, as well as Congresswoman Ilhan Omar for allowing Somalian gangs to take over the state, repeating the canard that Omar had married her brother.

Using the fact that the shooter was a Muslim, Trump’s “pause” is planning to block migration of people from 19 countries which he had targeted in June through an executive order restricting their immigration to the US. Half of those countries are Muslim-majority countries and eight of them from black Africa – Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela. In his first term, too, Trump had sought to ban all migration from Muslim countries.

The details of how this permanent pause will actually work are not very clear.

According to reports, Rahmanullah Lakanwal – the Afghan man accused of shooting the two National Guardsmen in Washington DC – was part of a CIA unit that was involved in some of the more brutal actions in the bloody war there and there is every possibility that he suffered from PTSD on account of his service there. As a result, what is clear is that the nearly 200,000 Afghans who worked with the US’s two decade long war will be the most affected because their residency will be reviewed. These are Afghans who fought with the US in the brutal US war in Afghanistan. Having put their lives on the line, they expected more from the US.

Immigration

US is a land of immigrants, though MAGA and Trump do not acknowledge this. But the Trump attitude is that countries are now sending their worst – criminals and drug peddlers – to the US. Immigrants from many regions of the globe have contributed to what the US is today from the point of view of its culture, economy and society. The most famous lines from the poem by Emma Lazarus inscribed on the Statue of Liberty in New York are “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” This may not have been official policy, but it did speak of the inspiration of the US immigration policy for over a century.

Before the 1960s, most migrants were Europeans fleeing war and poverty. The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act abolished national quotas, opening the door to Asian migration and to large numbers of undocumented migrants from Latin America. By 2018, the demographic map of migration had shifted dramatically: the European-Canadian share of the foreign-born fell from 84% in 1960 to 13%; South and Southeast Asians rose from 4% to 28%; immigrants from Latin America and Mexico grew from 4–7% to 25% each.

Another source of migration was refugees from around the world, Some 54,000 refugees were accepted into the US in 2017, but after Trump took office, the numbers halved and went down further by the end of his first term. Propelled by the Afghan fiasco, the successor Biden Administration announced a plan to sharply increase refugee numbers, and admitted nearly 200,000 between 2021-2024. Most of these had supported the US military mission in Afghanistan and their lives were in danger from the Taliban. The Trump administration has now capped annual refugee admissions at 7,500, while giving priority to white South Africans.

Immigration data suggests that 3.3 million lawful permanent residents (green card holders) come from the 19 countries being targeted for review. There are over a million Cubans, 700,000 Haitians and 400,000 Iranians. The total green card population in the US is about 12.8 million.

Racism

Racism is written all over Trump’s immigration policies but it is even more blatant in his foreign policy. He boycotted the G-20 summit held in South Africa this year and then barefacedly declared that he would not invite South Africa for the 2026 summit which is being presided over by the US. According to Trump he did not go to South Africa “because the South African government refuses to acknowledge or address the horrific human rights abuses endured by Afrikaners, and other descendants of Dutch, French and German settlers,” he said on Friday. For the same reason, “at my direction” South Africa “will NOT be receiving an invitation to the 2026 G 20.”

The whole issue of “White Genocide” is a figment of Trump’s imagination. South Africa does have a high overall murder rate, but the majority of the victims are black South Africans.

Domestically, it is no secret that Trump and MAGA attacks on civil rights movement and racial justice activism are nothing but racism. Under Trump, a high proportion of US attorneys, federal judges and senior national security appointees were white, and scholars have highlighted the lack of diversity in top posts. One of the first of his executive orders rolled back programmes on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes. In a May 2025 interview, he called diversity initiatives “reverse racism against white people” and a “scam on real Americans.” The Trump cabinet is almost all white and some appointees have a history of racist remarks.

A lot of this is summed up in Trump’s attitude to slavery in the US. In an August 2025 speech, he accused the Smithsonian Institution of focusing “too much on how bad slavery was” and said that their exhibits made the US look unpatriotic. He has called for greater “balance”, including playing down slavery in the interests of “unity”.

But Trump is reflecting the wider trends in the country. In the past year, besides gutting the DEI programmes, the Trump Administration has cut or frozen $3.4 billion in grants for black universities, public health research and black entrepreneurs. Data related to black maternal mortality and sickle cell disease which disproportionately affects blacks have been deleted. 591 books by black authors have been banned from Pentagon-run schools and libraries. Government websites have removed material related to black history.

The US will be the net loser from these policies. Besides social unrest within the US, America will lose as potential migrants go instead to Canada, Australia, Europe and even China. There is already a marked decline of migrants in its workforce. And by turning its back on the very people who supported its foreign wars, the US will struggle to find allies in future conflicts.

Manoj Joshi is a distinguished fellow, Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi.

This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.

This article went live on December second, two thousand twenty five, at forty-one minutes past eleven in the morning.

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