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TRUMP CASTS HIMSELF AS A PROTECTOR OF PERSECUTED WHITE PEOPLE  
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Zolan Kanno-Youngs
May 21, 2025
The New York Times
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_ President Trump publicly dressed down the president of South Africa
based on a fringe conspiracy theory, providing a vivid distillation of
his views on race. _

President Donald Trump met President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa
in the Oval Office on Wednesday.Credit..., Eric Lee/The New York Times


 

In the Oval Office on Wednesday
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President Trump positioned himself as the savior of white South
Africans.

Sitting alongside Cyril Ramaphosa, the president of South Africa, Mr.
Trump said white people were “being executed.” He referred over
and over again to “dead white people.” He dressed down Mr.
Ramaphosa, who helped his country cast off the racist policies of
apartheid, and questioned why he was not doing more when white people
were being killed.

“I don’t know how you explain that,” Mr. Trump said. “How do
you explain that?”

The American president was not much interested in the answer, which is
that police statistics do not show that white people are more
vulnerable
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crime than other people in South Africa
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The confrontation provided a vivid demonstration of Mr. Trump’s
views on race, which have animated his political life going back
years. After rising to power in part by framing himself as a
protector of white America
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Mr. Trump has used his platform, in this case the Oval Office, to
elevate claims of white grievance.

For Mr. Trump, white people are the true victims; Black people and
minorities have
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an unfair advantage in the United States. And when Mr. Trump looks to
South Africa, a majority-Black country emerging from a legacy of
apartheid and colonialism, he sees white people who need sanctuary in
the United States
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Invoking the teachings of his old mentor, Nelson Mandela, Mr.
Ramaphosa pleaded for civility in the dialogue between the two
leaders.

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Mr. Trump shrugged and turned to grab a pile of news articles that he
claimed affirmed his views of the mass killing of white people. He
even had an aide dim the lights in the Oval Office so he could put on
a video purporting to show burial sites of murdered white farmers (it
did not).

Mr. Trump was clearly more interested in hearing from the white South
African golfers on hand for the event than from Mr. Ramaphosa, who
gently tried to correct the record.

“There is criminality in our country — people who do get killed,
unfortunately, through criminal activity are not only white people,
majority of them are Black people,” Mr. Ramaphosa said.

Mr. Trump scowled when one of Mr. Ramaphosa’s aides, a Black woman,
tried to explain that brutal crimes in general are a problem in South
Africa.

Derrick Johnson, the president of the N.A.A.C.P., said Mr. Trump’s
remarks in the Oval Office were “extremely biased and racist.”

“It was a sickening display of propaganda that’s dangerous and
consistent of his narrative, whether it’s domestically or
globally,” Mr. Johnson said.

Mr. Johnson said Mr. Trump had a worldview “where he can only see
him and people that resemble him.”

Mr. Trump has faced blowback for his positions on race in the past,
particularly his position on the “Central Park Five,” the five
Black and Latino men who as teenagers were wrongly convicted of the
rape of a jogger in New York City in 1989.

He took out newspaper advertisements back then calling for New York
State to adopt the death penalty after the attack. In recent years,
Mr. Trump has refused to apologize about that.

Now, Mr. Trump is making efforts to purge the federal government —
and even American culture — of anything he deems “woke” or
promoting diversity.

This week, the Trump administration said it would open a civil rights
investigation
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the city of Chicago to see whether its mayor, who is Black, engaged in
a pattern of discrimination by hiring a number of Black people to
senior positions.

The administration said on Wednesday that it planned to drop efforts
to investigate or oversee nearly two dozen police departments
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of civil rights violations after a series of episodes of police
violence against Black people. Mr. Trump has also shuttered programs
designed to improve diversity
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the federal government, pressured private companies and threatened
universities that prioritize diversity in hiring.

Standing behind the White House lectern in January, Mr. Trump asserted
without evidence that diversity efforts at the Federal Aviation
Administration had resulted in an incompetent work force and a deadly
plane crash in Washington.
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Monday’s meeting with Mr. Ramaphosa came after Mr. Trump created an
exception to his refugee ban for Afrikaners, the white ethnic minority
in South Africa that led the apartheid government.

Mr. Trump’s claims of mass killings of white South Africans are a
common talking point among white supremacists and a fringe theory that
has been circulating since the end of apartheid in 1994. But they were
particularly striking as he made them while sitting in the White House
alongside Mr. Ramaphosa, who grew up under apartheid.

Mr. Trump also falsely accused the South African government of
confiscating land, pointing to a law that South Africa enacted
allowing the government to take private land in the public interest,
sometimes without providing compensation.

The law has not yet been used to seize any land, but some white South
Africans — and Mr. Trump — say it unfairly targets farmers, who
remain mostly white decades after apartheid policies.

“They’re being executed,” Mr. Trump said after Mr. Ramaphosa
tried to change the subject to areas of potential cooperation between
the two nations. “And they happen to be white and most of them
happen to be farmers.”

_Zolan Kanno-Youngs
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correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his
administration._

* Trump
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* Cyril Ramaphosa
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* Afrikaners
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* Racism
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