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Trump and Musk breathe poison rather than oxygen into our political cultures

Wilmot James
By Wilmot James
10 Feb 2025
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For the likes of Trump and Musk, human misfortune appears as if it is mere collateral damage in the longer-term effort to engineer their version of sustainable Western civilisation, on Earth as it will be on Mars.

Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison for his beliefs. He emerged with an enduring desire to establish a democratic and free society for all and not just some. He believed that South Africa could only succeed if the assets and talents of everyone including all minority populations were included in a forward-looking historical project for South Africa he called nation-building.

It is with the greatest regret that US President Donald Trump and his helper Elon Musk today seek to undo and shatter the peacemaking efforts of one of the greatest leaders of the 20th century.

Today the world’s most powerful man has struck a bargain with the world’s wealthiest man to bully South Africa into change by energising a small group of disgruntled extremists, destabilising the country’s politics and punishing its people.

South Africa’s Expropriation Act 13 of 2024 is merely a hook by which they launched their efforts, by twisting a law that is not race-based into one that supposedly is, thereby igniting the energies of a South African domestic constituency to join their global cause. In this effort, they join Steve Bannon, widely regarded as the Lenin of the Right.

Resettlement offer to Afrikaners


President Trump threatened to withdraw aid, which would have significant consequences for South Africa, and, in an act of perverse cynicism, offered refugee resettlement to Afrikaners (presumably only the white ones) as if they were being persecuted, which they are not.

If white Afrikaner farmers took up the offer, there is the possibility that it could send agricultural production in Africa’s leading economy into decline and threaten food security. The plan to shock and awe is of course deliberate, and the question is, who would author such a devilish deed?

Although President Trump is the enthusiastic executioner, Elon Musk is the thinker behind the scheme. A review of his tweets and interviews over the past decade reveals the narrative that is now the conventional dogma in their inner circle.

In his writing, Musk repeatedly remarked that population collapse caused by low and declining birth rates in the world’s leading economies (North America, Western Europe, South Korea, Japan and Singapore) is a trend that, unless reversed, will result in the decline of industrial (read Western) civilisation and the scientific innovation that drives it, or so he claims.

The cultural overlay of what looks like a mere academic if debatable demographic argument is best presented by a member of the Netherlands parliament Geert Wilders who, in response to Musk’s tweets, wrote that “[T]he biggest problem we face today is a collapse of our own culture and Western values due to open borders, mass immigration, an uncontrollable amount (sic) of non-Western asylum seekers but not least too many weak politicians advocating cultural relativism.”

“Agreed” Musk responded: “If the birth rate stays as low as it is, the Dutch nation will die out by its hand.”

Apartheid echoes


The strategic answer to the challenge, Musk observed, is to introduce incentives to propel greater birth rates in the world’s leading economies, not easy to achieve in the short run. What can, however, drive immediate change is significantly greater but highly selective immigration, admitting only those who are “smart, hardworking and honest”.

We can add European or white, like Trump’s favourite nationality, the Norwegians, or Musk’s Afrikaners. This eerily resembles apartheid’s assisted immigration scheme that brought thousands of protestants of Anglo-Saxon descent to bolster the white population during the 1960s and 1970s.

Impatient with the cadence of today’s political systems, especially the slow-moving and lowest-common-denominating democracies that struggle to get much done, Trump and Musk are overriding, disrupting and upending constitutional systems of government.

They give the concept of the “imperial presidency” new meaning. They breathe poison rather than oxygen into our political cultures. They ignore the norms and conventions of the international order and interfere in the domestic affairs of countries when they should not. Their political behaviour has a great deal in common with autocrats like Vladimir Putin.

And like Putin, they have a callous disregard for human life and seem to have a high tolerance for cruelty. They do not seem to care that by their hands, lives will be compromised and lost.

Human misfortune appears as if it is mere collateral damage in the longer-term effort to engineer the basis for their version of sustainable Western civilisation, on Earth as it will be on Mars. The opening line in the Ten Pillars of Wisdom, the book on which the film script for Lawrence of Arabia is based, starts with the memorable sentence ‘[T]he evil of my tale is inherent in the circumstance.’ So too the tale of our current-day circumstance. DM

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