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.
The data tell a different story. Although white people make 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 violent crime than other people. And white South Africans are far better off than Black people on virtually every marker 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 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 Mr. Trump’s description of his country.
But, Mr. du Preez added, white people have flourished since the end of apartheid in 1994.
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 Mr. Trump — say it unfairly targets 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 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 Mr. 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 last week 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 Mr. 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 Mr. 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 Mr. Roets appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show in 2018, Mr. Carlson posted on social media that “White farmers are being brutally murdered in South Africa for their land.”
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 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 Mr. Trump’s orbit, these themes are now being recirculated as warning signs for the United States.
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.
During an earlier conversation with Charlie Kirk, 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 “on the basis of race, gender and sexual orientation.”
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 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.
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.
But to Mr. 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 Mr. Trump supporting their claims of persecution, they would rather stay in South Africa, which they consider their rightful home.
Willem Petzer, an Afrikaner online influencer whose social media posts have been shared by Trump supporters, said he was considering Mr. Trump’s offer. But he said he hoped more than anything that South Africa’s government would end what he called its racism toward people who look like him.
“By the time I was a conscious human being, apartheid had been long gone,” Mr. Petzer, 28, said. “All I have ever known is discrimination against white people.”
That sort of rebranding of Afrikaners as victims has great resonance among the American far-right, said Mr. du Preez, the Afrikaner writer and historian, who founded the first anti-apartheid newspaper in Afrikaans.
“They’re playing on the thing of the white Christian civilization being threatened,” he said. “And that has a lot of appeal among the evangelicals and others in the United States.”
Zolan Kanno-Youngs contributed reporting from Washington.
