To listen to President Trump and a few of his closest supporters inform it, South Africa is a horrible place for white folks. They face discrimination, are sidelined from jobs and stay underneath the fixed risk of violence or having their land stolen by a corrupt, Black-led authorities that has left the nation in disarray.
The info inform a special story. Though white folks make up 7 p.c of the nation’s inhabitants, they personal at the least half of South Africa’s land. Police statistics don’t present that they’re any extra susceptible to violent crime than different folks. And white South Africans are much better off than Black folks on nearly each marker of the financial scale.
But Mr. Trump and his allies have pushed their own narrative of South Africa to press an argument at dwelling: If the US doesn’t clamp down on makes an attempt to advertise variety, America will change into a hotbed of dysfunction and anti-white discrimination.
“It performs into the fears of white folks in America and elsewhere: ‘We whites are threatened,’” Max du Preez, a white South African author and historian, mentioned of Mr. Trump’s description of his nation.
However, Mr. du Preez added, white folks have flourished for the reason that finish of apartheid in 1994.
The parallels between South Africa’s makes an attempt to undo the injustices of apartheid and the lengthy battle in the US to handle slavery, Jim Crow legal guidelines and different types of racial discrimination have change into a standard chorus amongst some Trump supporters.
Ernst Roets, a white activist and creator in South Africa, mentioned that when he spoke to like-minded conservatives in the US, they usually instructed him, “Oh, sure, we have to have a look at South Africa, as a result of that’s what’s in retailer for us if we’re not cautious.”
After apartheid fell three many years in the past, South Africa’s democratic authorities rose to energy on a promise to undo the inequities of a system that had left a lot of the nation’s Black majority in squalor. But President Nelson Mandela largely allowed white South Africans to maintain their wealth, in an effort to take care of a peaceable transition to democracy.
His social gathering, the African Nationwide Congress, has handed legal guidelines to attempt to shut the hole for Black folks. Most not too long ago, South Africa enacted one that permits the federal government to take personal land within the public curiosity, typically with out offering compensation.
The regulation has not but been used, however some white South Africans — and Mr. Trump — say it unfairly targets the nation’s landowners and industrial farmers, who stay principally white regardless of many years of anti-apartheid insurance policies.
Mr. Trump has constructed his political identification partially as a protector of white America. He has fought to save symbols of the Confederacy within the South, blasted racial sensitivity training as “un-American propaganda” and publicly defended white supremacists.
Cutting off aid to most of Africa whereas championing Afrikaners — the white ethnic minority in South Africa that led the apartheid authorities — seems to be the newest illustration of Mr. Trump’s dedication to white pursuits.
Final month, the president signed an govt order granting refugee standing to Afrikaners and suspending all help to South Africa, partly in response to its land-reform regulation. He mentioned on social media final week that the US would offer a rapid pathway to citizenship to South African farmers, a lot of whom are Afrikaner. Then on Friday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio called South Africa’s ambassador to the US, Ebrahim Rasool, “a race-baiting politician who hates America” and expelled him.
“Trump is signaling to white folks in every single place that he’ll use his energy to guard and advance their pursuits, regardless of the info,” mentioned Khalil Gibran Muhammad, a professor of African American research at Princeton College.
Some Afrikaners have welcomed Mr. Trump’s embrace. Activists traveled to Washington final month to foyer his administration for extra assist. A White Home official described the Afrikaner delegation as “civil rights leaders.”
Lots of Mr. Trump’s allies have lengthy spotlighted the grievances of Afrikaners. Elon Musk, who was born in South Africa however just isn’t of Afrikaner descent, has accused the nation’s authorities of selling racist legal guidelines, and falsely claimed that white farmers in South Africa have been being killed each day.
After Mr. Roets appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox Information present in 2018, Mr. Carlson posted on social media that “White farmers are being brutally murdered in South Africa for his or her land.”
Mr. Carlson later ran a phase describing land seizures and homicides. Mr. Trump, who was in his first time period on the time, then tagged Mr. Carlson in a social media post during which he mentioned he was ordering an investigation into farm seizures “and the massive scale killing of farmers” in South Africa, although to today no farms have been seized by the federal government.
In Mr. Trump’s orbit, these themes at the moment are being recirculated as warning indicators for the US.
Mr. Roets mentioned in an interview that he had change into near Jack Posobiec, the American far-right influencer who not too long ago accompanied Protection Secretary Pete Hegseth on a trip to Europe.
Throughout an earlier conversation with Charlie Kirk, an influential Trump ally, Mr. Posobiec mentioned that South Africa was in shambles due to its legal guidelines meant to supply racial fairness. He added that the US was headed down the identical path by hiring “on the premise of race, gender and sexual orientation.”
Many South African voters, no matter their race, agree that the African Nationwide Congress has created a rustic stricken by corruption, poor infrastructure, excessive crime and inequality, with persistent poverty amongst Black folks. Within the final election, the social gathering misplaced its outright majority in Parliament for the primary time for the reason that finish of apartheid.
Analysts notice that the social gathering went to nice lengths to embrace market-oriented insurance policies that allowed white South Africans to take care of their financial energy. In reality, many South Africans criticize Mr. Mandela for not requiring a extra aggressive redistribution of white-owned land to Black South Africans, whose households had been pressured off of it throughout apartheid and colonial occasions.
Supporters of the brand new land regulation hope that it’ll velocity up the long-held objective of giving again extra land to Black South Africans.
However to Mr. Trump, it’s Afrikaners who’re the “victims of unjust racial discrimination,” as he mentioned in his executive order signed final month.
Descended primarily from Dutch colonizers who arrived in southern Africa in 1652, Afrikaner folks grew to become worldwide darlings within the early 1900s as a small tribe that stood as much as the mighty British Empire in battles over territory (although they finally misplaced the struggle). The ruling British then seemed down on Afrikaners as uncouth, and people fights sowed bitter divisions between South Africa’s two largest white populations that exist to today.
Whereas the president has typically tried to prohibit refugees or asylum seekers from getting into the US, he has carved out a particular avenue for some white Africans to come back into the nation.
That has not essentially lined up with the desires of his target market. Many Afrikaners have mentioned that whereas they recognize Mr. Trump supporting their claims of persecution, they might moderately keep in South Africa, which they think about their rightful dwelling.
Willem Petzer, an Afrikaner on-line influencer whose social media posts have been shared by Trump supporters, mentioned he was contemplating Mr. Trump’s supply. However he mentioned he hoped greater than something that South Africa’s authorities would finish what he known as its racism towards individuals who seem like him.
“By the point I used to be a acutely aware human being, apartheid had been lengthy gone,” Mr. Petzer, 28, mentioned. “All I’ve ever identified is discrimination towards white folks.”
That kind of rebranding of Afrikaners as victims has nice resonance among the many American far-right, mentioned Mr. du Preez, the Afrikaner author and historian, who based the primary anti-apartheid newspaper in Afrikaans.
“They’re enjoying on the factor of the white Christian civilization being threatened,” he mentioned. “And that has a number of attraction among the many evangelicals and others in the US.”
Zolan Kanno-Youngs contributed reporting from Washington.
