JOHANNESBURG — To hear President Donald 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.

The data tells a different story. Although white people make up 7% 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 violent crime than others. And white South Africans are far better off than Black people on virtually every marker of the economic scale.

Yet 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 attempts to promote diversity, America will become a hotbed of dysfunction and anti-white discrimination.

“It plays into the fears of white people in America and elsewhere: ‘We whites are threatened,’” Max du Preez, a white South African writer and historian, said of Trump’s description of his country.

But, du Preez added, white people have flourished since the end of apartheid in 1994.

Parallels Between South Africa and the United States

The parallels between South Africa’s 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.

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, “Oh, yes, we need to look at South Africa, because that’s what’s in store for us if we’re not cautious.”

After apartheid fell three decades ago, South Africa’s democratic government rose to power on a promise to undo the inequities of a system that had left much of the country’s 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.

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.

The law has not yet been used, but some white South Africans — and Trump — say it unfairly targets the country’s landowners and commercial farmers, who remain mostly white despite decades of anti-apartheid policies.

Trump Builds Political Identity as Protector of White America

Trump has built his political identity in part as a protector of white America. He has fought to save symbols of the Confederacy in the South, blasted racial sensitivity training as “un-American propaganda” and publicly defended white supremacists.

Cutting off aid to most of Africa while championing Afrikaners — the white ethnic minority in South Africa that led the apartheid government — appears to be the latest illustration of Trump’s commitment to white interests.

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 earlier this month that the United States would offer 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 hates America” and expelled him.

“Trump is signaling to white people everywhere that he will use his power to protect and advance their interests, no matter the facts,” said Khalil Gibran Muhammad, a professor of African American studies at Princeton University.

Some Afrikaners have welcomed Trump’s embrace. Activists traveled to Washington last month to lobby his administration for more support. A White House official described the Afrikaner delegation as “civil rights leaders.”

Many of Trump’s 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’s government of promoting racist laws, and falsely claimed that white farmers in South Africa were being killed every day.

After Roets appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show in 2018, Carlson posted on social media that “White farmers are being brutally murdered in South Africa for their land.”

Carlson Runs Segment Describing Land Seizures, Homicides

Carlson later ran a segment describing land seizures and homicides. Trump, who was in his first term at the time, then tagged Carlson in a social media post in which he said he was ordering an investigation into farm seizures “and the large scale killing of farmers” in South Africa, though to this day, no farms have been seized by the government.

In Trump’s orbit, these themes are now being recirculated as warning signs for the United States.

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.

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 Mandela for not requiring a more aggressive redistribution of white-owned land to Black South Africans, whose families had been forced off it during apartheid and colonial times.

Supporters of the land law hope that it will speed up the long-held goal of giving back land to Black South Africans.

But to Trump, it is Afrikaners who are the “victims of unjust racial discrimination,” as he said in his executive order signed last month.

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’s two largest white populations that exist to this day.

While the president has generally tried to prohibit refugees or asylum-seekers from entering the United States, he has carved out a special avenue for some white Africans to come into the country.

That has not necessarily lined up with the wishes of his target audience. Many Afrikaners have said that while they appreciate Trump supporting their claims of persecution, they would rather stay in South Africa, which they consider their rightful home.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By John Eligon/Joao Silva
c. 2025 The New York Times Company