To hear President Trump and some of his closest supporters say, South Africa is a terrible place for whites. They are confronted with discrimination, are sidelined by jobs and live under the constant threat of violence or are robbed their land by a corrupt government and led by blacks who left the country in disarray.
The data tells another story. Although whites represent 7% of the country’s population, they have at least half of the land in South Africa. Police statistics do not show that they are more vulnerable to violent crimes than others. And white South Africans are much better off than blacks on practically all the markers of the economic scale.
However, Mr. Trump and his allies have pushed their own account of South Africa to put pressure on an argument at home: if the United States does not serve attempts to promote diversity, America will become a home for dysfunction and anti-white discrimination.
“It plays in the fears of whites in America and elsewhere:” We, the whites, are threatened, “said Max du Preez, a white South African writer and historian, about the description of Mr. Trump of his country.
But, added Mr. Du Preez, the whites have prospered since the end of apartheid in 1994.
The parallels between the attempts of South Africa to undo the injustices of apartheid and the long struggle in the United States to fight against slavery, the laws of Jim Crow and other forms of racial discrimination have become a common refrain among certain supporters of Trump.
Ernst Roets, white activist and author in South Africa, said that when he spoke to conservatives sharing the same ideas in the United States, they have often told him: “Oh, yes, we have to look at South Africa, because this is what reserves us if we are not cautious.”
After the fall of apartheid three decades ago, the Democratic Government of South Africa reached power on a promise to cancel the inequalities of a system that had left a large part of the country’s black majority in misery. However, President Nelson Mandela has largely allowed White South Africans to keep their wealth, in order to maintain a peaceful transition to democracy.
His party, the African National Congress, adopted laws to try to fill the gap for blacks. More recently, South Africa has promulgated one which allows the government to take private land in the public interest, sometimes without providing compensation.
The law has not yet been used, but some white South Africans – and Mr. Trump – say that he unjustly targets landowners and commercial farmers in the country, who are mainly white despite decades of anti -apartheid policies.
Trump built his political identity in part as a protector of white America. He fought to save the symbols of the Confederation in the South, blew racial sensitivity formation as a “non -American propaganda” and white supremacists defended publicly.
Cutting aid to the majority of Africa while defending Afrikaners – the white ethnic minority in South Africa which led the A apartheid government – seems to be the last illustration of Mr. Trump’s commitment to white interests.
Last month, the president signed a decree granting refugee status to Afrikaners and suspending all the aid to South Africa, partly in response to his land reform law. He declared on social networks last week that the United States would offer a fast way to citizenship to South African farmers, many of which are Afrikaner. Then Friday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio called The ambassador of South Africa to the United States, Ebrahim Rasol, “a racing bait politician who hates America” and expelled it.
“Trump reports to whites wherever he uses his power to protect and advance their interests, no matter the facts,” Khalil Gibran Muhammad, professor of African-American studies at Princeton University said.
Some Afrikaners have welcomed Mr. Trump’s embrace. Activists went to Washington last month to put his administration for more support. A White House official described the Afrikaner delegation as “civil rights leaders”.
Many Trump allies have long highlighted the grievances of Afrikaners. Elon Musk, who was born in South Africa but is not of Afrikaner origin, accused the government of the country of promoting racist laws, and wrongly that the white farmers in South Africa were killed every day.
After Mr. Roets appeared in the Fox News show by Tucker Carlson in 2018, Mr. Carlson Published on social networks that “white farmers are brutally murdered in South Africa for their land”.
Mr. Carlson then led a segment describing convulsions and homicides. Trump, who was in his first mandate at the time, then marked Mr. Carlson in a social media position in which he declared that he was ordered an investigation into farm crises “and the large -scale murder of farmers” in South Africa, but to date, no farm has been seized by the government.
In Mr. Trump’s orbit, these themes are now recirculated as a warning signs for the United States.
Roets said in an interview that he had become close to Jack Posobiet, the American far right influencer who recently accompanied the defense secretary Pete Hegseth during a trip to Europe.
During An earlier conversation with Charlie KirkAn influential ally of Trump, Mr. Posobiec said that South Africa was in ruins due to its laws intended to produce racial equity. He added that the United States was heading on the same path by hiring “on the basis of race, sex and sexual orientation”.
Many South African voters, whatever their race, agree that the African National Congress has created a country plagued by corruption, mediocre infrastructure, high crimes and inequality, with persistent poverty among blacks. In the last elections, the party lost its outright majority in Parliament for the first time since the end of apartheid.
Analysts note that the party collapsed to adopt market-oriented policies that allowed White South Africans to maintain their economic power. In fact, many South Africans criticize Mr. Mandela so as not to need a more aggressive redistribution of land belonging to whites to black South Africans, whose families had been forced at the time of apartheid and the colonial.
Supporters of the new land law hope that it will accelerate the long-standing objective to restore more land to black South Africans.
But for Mr. Trump, it is the Afrikaners who are the “victims of unjust racial discrimination”, as he said in his executive decree signed last month.
Mainly descents from the Dutch colonizers who arrived in southern Africa in 1652, the Afrikaner became international cherished in the early 1900s as a small tribe which resisted the powerful British Empire in battles on the territory (although they finally lost the war). The British in power then looked at Afrikaners as rude, and these fights have sown bitter divisions between the two largest white populations in South Africa that exist to date.
Although the president has generally tried to prohibit refugees or asylum seekers from entering the United States, he has cut a special avenue for some white Africans to enter the country.
This has not necessarily aligned the wishes of its target audience. Many Afrikaners have said that even if they appreciated Mr. Trump supporting their demands for persecution, they prefer to stay in South Africa, whom they consider to be their legitimate house.
Willem Petzer, an Afrikaner online influencer whose publications on social networks were shared by Trump supporters, said that he was considering Mr. Trump’s offer. But he said that he hoped more than anything that the government of South Africa would end what he called his racism towards the people who resemble him.
“As I was a conscious human being, apartheid had long disappeared,” said Petzer, 28. “All I have ever known is discrimination against whites.”
This kind of brand change of Afrikaners as victims has a great resonance among the far-right Americans, said Mr. Du Preez, the writer and historian Afrikaner, who founded the first anti-apartheid newspaper in Afrikaans.
“They play on the thing that the white Christian civilization threatened,” he said. “And that has a lot of appeal among evangelical and others in the United States.”
Zolan Kanno-Youngs contributed to the Washington reports.
