\n<\/p>\n
To hear President Trump and some of his closest supporters tell it, South Africa is a terrible place for white people. They face discrimination, are sidelined from jobs and live under the constant threat of violence or having their land stolen by a corrupt, Black-led government that has left the country in disarray.<\/p>\n
The data tell a different story. Although white people make up 7 percent of the country\u2019s population, they own at least half of South Africa\u2019s land. Police statistics do not show that they are any more vulnerable to violent crime than other people. And white South Africans are far better off than Black people on virtually every marker of the economic scale.<\/p>\n
Yet Mr. Trump and his allies have pushed their own narrative of South Africa<\/a> to press an argument at home: If the United States doesn\u2019t clamp down on attempts to promote diversity, America will become a hotbed of dysfunction and anti-white discrimination.<\/p>\n \u201cIt plays into the fears of white people in America and elsewhere: \u2018We whites are threatened,\u2019\u201d Max du Preez, a white South African writer and historian, said of Mr. Trump\u2019s description of his country.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n But, Mr. du Preez added, white people have flourished since the end of apartheid in 1994.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The parallels between South Africa\u2019s attempts to undo the injustices of apartheid and the long struggle in the United States to address slavery, Jim Crow laws and other forms of racial discrimination have become a common refrain among some Trump supporters.<\/p>\n Ernst Roets, a white activist and author in South Africa, said that when he spoke to like-minded conservatives in the United States, they often told him, \u201cOh, yes, we need to look at South Africa, because that\u2019s what\u2019s in store for us if we\u2019re not cautious.\u201d<\/p>\n After apartheid fell three decades ago, South Africa\u2019s democratic government rose to power on a promise to undo the inequities of a system that had left much of the country\u2019s Black majority in squalor. Yet President Nelson Mandela largely allowed white South Africans to keep their wealth, in an effort to maintain a peaceful transition to democracy.<\/p>\n His party, the African National Congress, has passed laws to try to close the gap for Black people. Most recently, South Africa enacted one that allows the government to take private land in the public interest, sometimes without providing compensation.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The law has not yet been used, but some white South Africans \u2014 and Mr. Trump \u2014 say it unfairly targets the country\u2019s landowners and commercial farmers, who remain mostly white despite decades of anti-apartheid policies.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Mr. Trump has built his political identity in part as a protector of white America.<\/a> He has fought to save symbols of the Confederacy<\/a> in the South, blasted racial sensitivity training<\/a> as \u201cun-American propaganda\u201d and publicly defended white supremacists<\/a>.<\/p>\n Cutting off aid<\/a> to most of Africa while championing Afrikaners \u2014 the white ethnic minority in South Africa that led the apartheid government \u2014 appears to be the latest illustration of Mr. Trump\u2019s commitment to white interests.<\/p>\n Last month, the president signed an executive order granting refugee status to Afrikaners and suspending all aid to South Africa, partly in response to its land-reform law. He said on social media last week that the United States would offer a rapid pathway to citizenship<\/a> to South African farmers, many of whom are Afrikaner. Then on Friday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio called<\/a> South Africa\u2019s ambassador to the United States, Ebrahim Rasool, \u201ca race-baiting politician who hates America\u201d and expelled him<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cTrump is signaling to white people everywhere that he will use his power to protect and advance their interests, no matter the facts,\u201d said Khalil Gibran Muhammad, a professor of African American studies at Princeton University.<\/p>\n Some Afrikaners have welcomed Mr. Trump\u2019s embrace. Activists traveled to Washington last month to lobby his administration for more support. A White House official described the Afrikaner delegation as \u201ccivil rights leaders.\u201d<\/p>\n Many of Mr. Trump\u2019s allies have long spotlighted the grievances of Afrikaners. Elon Musk, who was born in South Africa but is not of Afrikaner descent, has accused the country\u2019s government of promoting racist laws, and falsely claimed<\/a> that white farmers in South Africa were being killed every day.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n After Mr. Roets appeared on Tucker Carlson\u2019s Fox News show in 2018, Mr. Carlson posted on social media<\/a> that \u201cWhite farmers are being brutally murdered in South Africa for their land.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Mr. Carlson later ran a segment describing land seizures and homicides. Mr. Trump, who was in his first term at the time, then tagged Mr. Carlson in a social media post<\/a> in which he said he was ordering an investigation into farm seizures \u201cand the large scale killing of farmers\u201d in South Africa, though to this day no farms have been seized by the government.<\/p>\n In Mr. Trump\u2019s orbit, these themes are now being recirculated as warning signs for the United States.<\/p>\n Mr. Roets said in an interview that he had become close to Jack Posobiec, the American far-right influencer who recently accompanied Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on a trip to Europe<\/a>.<\/p>\n During an earlier conversation with Charlie Kirk<\/a>, an influential Trump ally, Mr. Posobiec said that South Africa was in shambles because of its laws meant to produce racial equity. He added that the United States was headed down the same path by hiring \u201con the basis of race, gender and sexual orientation.\u201d<\/p>\n Many South African voters, regardless of their race, agree that the African National Congress has created a country plagued by corruption, poor infrastructure, high crime and inequality, with persistent poverty among Black people. In the last election, the party lost its outright majority in Parliament for the first time since the end of apartheid.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Analysts note that the party went to great lengths to embrace market-oriented policies that allowed white South Africans to maintain their economic power. In fact, many South Africans criticize Mr. Mandela for not requiring a more aggressive redistribution of white-owned land to Black South Africans, whose families had been forced off of it during apartheid and colonial times.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Supporters of the new land law hope that it will speed up the long-held goal of giving back more land to Black South Africans.<\/p>\n But to Mr. Trump, it is Afrikaners who are the \u201cvictims of unjust racial discrimination,\u201d as he said in his executive order<\/a> signed last month.<\/p>\n Descended primarily from Dutch colonizers who arrived in southern Africa in 1652, Afrikaner people became international darlings in the early 1900s as a small tribe that stood up to the mighty British Empire in battles over territory (though they ultimately lost the war). The ruling British then looked down on Afrikaners as uncouth, and those fights sowed bitter divisions between South Africa\u2019s two largest white populations that exist to this day.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n