South Africa is a terrible place for white people to hear President Trump and some of his closest supporters say it. They face discrimination, are sidelined from their jobs, live under the constant threat of violence, or have their land stolen by a corrupt, black-led government, leaving the country in chaos.
The data tells a different story. White people make up 7% of the country's population, but own at least half of South Africa's land. Police statistics do not show that they are more vulnerable to violent crime than others. And white South Africans are far superior to blacks at almost every marker of the size of the economy.
But Trump and his allies pushed their own South African narratives to impose debate at home. If the US does not crack down on its attempts to promote diversity, it will become a hotbed of dysfunction and anti-white racism.
“It terrifies white people in America and elsewhere. 'We're being threatened by white people.'” Max du Please, a white writer and historian from South Africa, said of Trump's account of his country.
But Du Please added that white people have flourished since the end of apartheid in 1994.
The parallels between attempts to cancel South Africa's apartheid injustice and the long struggle in the US to deal with slavery have made Jim Crow's laws and other forms of racism a common holdoff among Trump supporters.
When he spoke to like-minded conservatives in the US, Ernst Roetz, a white South African activist and author, they often told him, “Oh, yes, we need to see South Africa.
After apartheid fell 30 years ago, the South African Democratic government fulfilled its promise to cancel the inequality of the system that left many of the country's black majority in Scalor. However, President Nelson Mandela largely allowed white South Africans to maintain their wealth in order to maintain a peaceful transition to democracy.
His party, the African National Congress, passed laws to try to close the black gap. More recently, South Africa has enacted what allows the government to take private land for the public interest.
Although the law is still not in use, some white South Africans, and Trump, say they are unfairly targeting landowners and commercial farmers in the country, who remain mostly white despite decades of anti-apartheid policies.
Trump has built his political identity as a white American guardian. He fought to save Confederate symbols in the South, defending white supremacists who denounced racial sensitivity training as “non-American propaganda.”
While defending Africans, the majority of Africans will cut aid to Africa – the white ethnic minority in South Africa who led the apartheid government – appears to be the latest example of Trump's commitment to white interests.
Last month, the president signed an executive order granting Africans the status of refugees and suspending all aid to South Africa in accordance with the Land Reform Act. He said last week on social media that the US would provide South African farmers with a rapid path to citizenship. Then, on Friday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio banished South Africa's US ambassador, Ebrahim Lasor, who was “a resigning politician who hates America.”
“They're the ones who are studying African Americans,” said Halil Gibran Muhammad, professor of African American studies at Princeton University.
Some Africans welcome Trump's embrace. Activists traveled to Washington last month to lobby the administration and received more support. White House officials described African delegations as “civil rights leaders.”
Many of Trump's allies have long been in the spotlight on the frustration of Africans. Elon Musk, born in South Africa but not of African descent, accusing the country's government of promoting racist laws, falsely claiming that white South African farmers are killed every day.
After Loetz appeared on Tucker Carlson's Fox News Show in 2018, Carlson posted on social media that “white farmers are being brutally murdered on their land in South Africa.”
Carlson later ran a segment explaining land seizures and murders. Trump, who was in his first term at the time, tagged Carlson in a social media post that he said he ordered an investigation into a farm attack in South Africa to investigate “a massive killing of farmers,” but to this day the farm has not been seized by the government.
In Trump's orbit, these themes are now being recirculated as US warning signs.
In an interview, Rotes said he had approached Jack Posviek, a far-right influencer from America who recently accompanied Secretary of Defense Pete Hegses on a trip to Europe.
In a previous conversation with influential Trump ally Charlie Kirk, Posobiec said South Africa is in a hellish situation due to laws intended to create racial equity. He added that the US was on the same path by hiring “based on race, gender and sexual orientation.”
Many South African voters, regardless of their race, agree that African National Assembly 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 a full majority in Parliament for the first time since the end of apartheid.
Analysts note that the party has spent quite a bit of time embracing market-oriented policies that will allow white South Africans to maintain their economic strength. In fact, many South Africans have criticized Mandela for not requiring a more aggressive redistribution of white-owned land to black South Africans whose families were then driven out during apartheid and colonial times.
Proponents of the new Land Act hope to speed up their longstanding goal of giving back more land to black people in South Africa.
But for Trump, as he said in the executive order signed last month, Africans are “victims of unfair racism.”
Africans, who had descended mostly from Dutch colonists who arrived in South Africa in 1652, became international Darlings in the early 1900s, as small tribes who stood up against the British Empire fighting across territory (although they ultimately lost war). The ruling British then looked down on the Africans well, and their battles owned a bitter division between the two largest white groups in South Africa that exist to this day.
The president has generally sought to ban refugees and asylum seekers from entering the United States, but he paves a special pathway for some white Africans to come to the country.
It doesn't necessarily line up with the wishes of his target audience. Many Africans are grateful to Trump for supporting the claims of persecution, but say they will rather remain in South Africa, where they consider their legitimate home.
Willem Petzer, an online African influencer whose social media posts are shared by Trump supporters, said he is considering Trump's offer. But he said he wanted the South African government to end what he called racism against those who appear to him.
“By the time I was a conscious person, apartheid had been gone for a long time,” said Pezzer, 28. “All I've ever known is discrimination against white people.”
African writer and historian Du Priss said that such a rebrand of Africans, which stated that Africans had a great resonance among the American far-right, created the first anti-apartheid newspaper for Africans.
“They are playing about the threat of white Christian civilization,” he said. “And it has a lot of appeal among American evangelicals and others.”
Zolan Kanno-Youngs contributed to the report from Washington.
