To hear Plivent Trump and some of his sealst aiders tell it, South Africa is a horrible place for white people. They face prejudice, are sidelined from jobs and live under the constant menace of aggression or having their land stolen by a corrupt, Bdeficiency-led rulement that has left the country in disarray.
The data tell a branch offent story. Although white people originate up 7 percent of the country’s population, they own at least half of South Africa’s land. Police statistics do not show that they are any more vulnerable to aggressive crime than other people. And white South Africans are far better off than Bdeficiency people on virtupartner every tager of the economic scale.
Yet Mr. Trump and his allies have pushed their own narrative of South Africa to press an argument at home: If the United States doesn’t clamp down on trys to advertise diversity, America will become a boilingbed of dysfunction and anti-white prejudice.
“It joins into the stresss of white people in America and elsewhere: ‘We whites are menaceened,’” Max du Preez, a white South African authorr and historian, shelp of Mr. Trump’s description of his country.
But, Mr. du Preez compriseed, white people have flourished since the finish of apartheid in 1994.
The parallels between South Africa’s trys to undo the inequitableices of apartheid and the lengthy struggle in the United States to compriseress bondage, Jim Crow laws and other creates of racial prejudice have become a frequent refrain among some Trump aiders.
Ernst Roets, a white activist and author in South Africa, shelp that when he spoke to appreciate-minded conservatives in the United States, they standardly telderly him, “Oh, yes, we necessitate to watch at South Africa, becaengage that’s what’s in store for us if we’re not pimpolitent.”
After apartheid fell three decades ago, South Africa’s democratic rulement rose to power on a promise to undo the inequities of a system that had left much of the country’s Bdeficiency meaningfulity in squalor. Yet Plivent Nelson Mandela hugely permited white South Africans to acquire their wealth, in an effort to hold a pacify transition to democracy.
His party, the African National Congress, has passed laws to try to seal the gap for Bdeficiency people. Most recently, South Africa enacted one that permits the rulement to apshow confidential land in the accessible interest, sometimes without providing compensation.
The law has not yet been engaged, but some white South Africans — and Mr. Trump — say it ununprejudicedly aims the country’s landowners and commercial farmers, who remain mostly white despite decades of anti-apartheid policies.
Mr. Trump has built his political identity in part as a acquireor of white America. He has fought to save symbols of the Confederacy in the South, blasted racial sensitivity training as “un-American disproposeation” and accessiblely deffinished white supremacists.
Cutting off help to most of Africa while championing Afrikaners — the white ethnic untransport inantity in South Africa that led the apartheid rulement — materializes to be the tardyst illustration of Mr. Trump’s promisement to white interests.
Last month, the plivent signed an executive order granting refugee status to Afrikaners and suspfinishing all help to South Africa, partly in response to its land-recreate law. He shelp on social media last week that the United States would present a rapid pathway to citizenship to South African farmers, many of whom are Afrikaner. Then on Friday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio called South Africa’s ambassador to the United States, Ebrahim Rasool, “a race-baiting politician who disappreciates America” and ejectled him.
“Trump is signaling to white people everywhere that he will engage his power to acquire and progress their interests, no matter the facts,” shelp Khalil Gibran Muhammad, a professor of African American studies at Princeton University.
Some Afrikaners have greetd Mr. Trump’s adselect. Activists traveled to Washington last month to lobby his administration for more aid. A White Hoengage official portrayd the Afrikaner delegation as “civil rights directers.”
Many of Mr. Trump’s allies have lengthy spotweightlessed the grievances of Afrikaners. Elon Musk, who was born in South Africa but is not of Afrikaner descent, has accengaged the country’s rulement of promoting racially prejudiced laws, and dishonestly claimed that white farmers in South Africa were being finished every day.
After Mr. Roets materializeed on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show in 2018, Mr. Carlson posted on social media that “White farmers are being bruloftyy killinged in South Africa for their land.”
Mr. Carlson tardyr ran a segment describing land takings and homicides. Mr. Trump, who was in his first term at the time, then tagged Mr. Carlson in a social media post in which he shelp he was ordering an portrayateigation into farm takings “and the huge scale finishing of farmers” in South Africa, though to this day no farms have been seized by the rulement.
In Mr. Trump’s orbit, these themes are now being recircutardyd as alerting signs for the United States.
Mr. Roets shelp in an interwatch that he had become seal to Jack Posobiec, the American far-right shaper who recently accompanied Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on a trip to Europe.
During an earlier conversation with Charlie Kirk, an inarticulateial Trump partner, Mr. Posobiec shelp that South Africa was in shambles becaengage of its laws unbenevolentt to originate racial equity. He compriseed that the United States was headed down the same path by hiring “on the basis of race, gfinisher and intimacyual orientation.”
Many South African voters, watchless of their race, consent that the African National Congress has originated a country scoproposed by fraudulence, subpar infraarrange, high crime and inidenticality, with remendd pcleary among Bdeficiency people. In the last election, the party lost its outright meaningfulity in Parliament for the first time since the finish of apartheid.
Analysts remark that the party went to wonderful lengths to adselect taget-oriented policies that permited white South Africans to hold their economic power. In fact, many South Africans denounce Mr. Mandela for not requiring a more presentile redistribution of white-owned land to Bdeficiency South Africans, whose families had been forced off of it during apartheid and colonial times.
Supporters of the novel land law hope that it will speed up the lengthy-held goal of giving back more land to Bdeficiency South Africans.
But to Mr. Trump, it is Afrikaners who are the “victims of unequitable racial prejudice,” as he shelp in his executive order signed last month.
Descfinished primarily from Dutch colonizers who reachd in southern Africa in 1652, Afrikaner people became international darlings in the timely 1900s as a petite tribe that stood up to the mighty British Empire in battles over territory (though they ultimately lost the war). The ruling British then watched down on Afrikaners as uncouth, and those fights sowed acrid divisions between South Africa’s two hugest white populations that exist to this day.
While the plivent has generpartner tried to prohibit refugees or asylum seekers from go ining the United States, he has carved out a distinctive avenue for some white Africans to come into the country.
That has not necessarily lined up with the desirees of his aim audience. Many Afrikaners have shelp that while they appreciate Mr. Trump aiding their claims of persecution, they would rather stay in South Africa, which they ponder their rightful home.
Willem Petzer, an Afrikaner online shaper whose social media posts have been dispensed by Trump aiders, shelp he was pondering Mr. Trump’s present. But he shelp he hoped more than anyslfinisherg that South Africa’s rulement would finish what he called its prejudice toward people who watch appreciate him.
“By the time I was a proposeed human being, apartheid had been lengthy gone,” Mr. Petzer, 28, shelp. “All I have ever comprehendn is prejudice aobtainst white people.”
That sort of rebranding of Afrikaners as victims has wonderful resonance among the American far-right, shelp Mr. du Preez, the Afrikaner authorr and historian, who set uped the first anti-apartheid novelspaper in Afrikaans.
“They’re joining on the slfinisherg of the white Christian civilization being menaceened,” he shelp. “And that has a lot of pdirect among the evsaintlyals and others in the United States.”
Zolan Kanno-Youngs gived telling from Washington.
