Trump Tries to Use White South Africans as Cautionary Tale

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.

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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.”

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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.”

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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.

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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.”

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