John Eligon
Appearances
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. For decades, white South Africans ruled with an iron fist, overseeing the country's cruel system of racial oppression. So why is President Trump now welcoming them to the U.S. as victims? Today, John Eligo on how the MAGA movement became obsessed with AfriConners. It's Monday, May 19th. John, welcome back to The Daily.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
John, once Donald Trump picks up on the story of the Afrikaners, and once he begins to see them as a potential cautionary tale for white people in the United States, what does he end up doing about it?
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
Well, nothing happened in that first term, to be frank, as was the case often in his first term. He had sort of the more savvy operators around him who were able to sort of rein in his impulses. But... As we know, he got back into office in 2025, started his second term.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
Yeah, so essentially when Trump came into office, we know he had this flurry of executive orders that he signed. And among those executive orders was an order that essentially suspended the refugee program. So this is essentially the program where you have... People who are in war-torn places like Sudan, where we've been driven from Sudan.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
And shortly after he came into office, the president of South Africa, he signed into law a bill that would essentially allow the government to take privately held land without providing compensation to the owners. And as you can imagine, this a lot of Afrikaners see as a way that the government will directly be able to target their land and take it from them.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
Now, in reality, the law is not that aggressive. What do you mean? It's meant for the government to take land in the public interest. So one government minister said it was akin to eminent domain in the U.S., And most legal experts say that this would be very rare that they would take without compensation.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
It would most likely be in cases where there's land just sitting there in disrepair, where the owner's not doing anything to take care of it, the owner's abandoned it, and it's just, you know, lying fallow, right?
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
They'd say that's sort of the most sensible case in which it would happen, and that this would not be something that would be used to go after Afrikaners and push them off their land and get Black people land ownership. But... When Trump hears about this law, he talks about it in ways that don't have any of that nuance.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
He talks to reporters saying that in South Africa they're doing terrible things.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
And those statements just really send the whole Trump orbit into overdrive against South Africa.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
Elon Musk, who's one of Trump's close advisors, who is from South Africa, you have him posting on social media about this land law and then asking the government openly, like, why do you have racist laws?
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, turning down an invitation to go to a G20 meeting in South Africa, you know, citing this law. And then it ultimately sort of like peaks in this moment in February. Yeah. Where you had Trump issue an executive order that cut all aid that the U.S.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
Wow. And then he said he was offering refugee status to Afrikaners. And he cites this land law as one of the reasons.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
And in his executive order, he says that the land law, quote, follows countless government policies designed to dismantle equal opportunity in employment, education and business and hateful rhetoric and government actions fueling disproportionate violence against racially disfavored landowners.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
By which he means white Afrikaners.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
People in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where there's an ongoing war for decades now. Tens of thousands of Afghans who had been approved, they had been screened, and they'd been ready to come over to the U.S. to be resettled. But by suspending the program, you essentially stop all that.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
He also calls them the victims of, quote, unjust racial discrimination. So what this does is essentially it opens up a pathway now for refugee status, for someone to come to the U.S. as refugees. And in this case, it's specifically Afrikaners who can come to the U.S. as refugees. So after he signs this executive order, this effort to get Afrikaners in America, it proceeded with stunning speed.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
Usually it takes years to get refugees into the U.S. But three months after this executive order is issued, we have the first Afrikaner refugees, 59 of them, lined up at the airport in Johannesburg waiting to get on a flight to the U.S.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
John, the inevitable question here would seem to be, how much has this decision by the president and those around him truly been about the circumstances of Afrikaners in South Africa? and the threat level against them. Because of this land law, because of everything else we've been talking about, and how much has it been about circumstances within the United States?
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
The perceived threat level against... white citizens here? In other words, is this about the tale of the Afrikaners or that cautionary tale that Trump and those around him feel it represents to white Americans? Or is it both?
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
I think by most objective measures, the facts on the ground in South Africa do not match up with the way Trump has described the situation there for Afrikaners. Obviously, there are cases, like we've said, where Afrikaners are killed. And there is a sincere perception, I believe, among Afrikaners many Afrikaners I've spoken with, that they are targeted, that they are treated unfairly.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
That is a sincere belief that I think a lot of them do have. That said... When you look at Trump's attention to this issue, it seems very much motivated by domestic circumstances in America. If you listen to people in Trump's orbit... We're required to pretend this isn't happening, but it is happening.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
And can you remind us what President Trump's rationale was for doing that?
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
Many of them will point to South Africa and say South Africa is the example. of what America will become if we allow these diversity, equity, and inclusion policies to just run rampant.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
So by targeting South Africa, Trump builds points with his base in the U.S., which very much frowns upon any sort of legal measure or any sort of initiatives that even have a whiff of trying to address racial injustice in a way that makes it seem like it's discriminating against white people.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
Yeah. His broad rationale is that, hey, this is something that threatens the interests of the United States. So they've talked about how bringing in refugees who are not properly vetted for security reasons could come in and harm the country.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
I wonder if within the Trump administration, this feels akin to taking their domestic values, which they have been very firm about, like you said, rolling back diversity initiatives across government and even the private sector, and putting those now at the center of U.S. foreign policy. Yeah.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
And saying if this is going to be central to how we treat domestic policy, this will be central to how we treat our relationships across the world.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
The U.S. government, Trump's administration, has said that explicitly that they were cutting funding for programs that they believe further these issues of DEI, you know, diversity, equity, inclusion. So undoubtedly what you're saying, Michael, is the case in terms of that they are sort of putting their own judgment and their own values on what they see is happening in South Africa. Yeah.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
And I'll also note, when you talk to South Africans, you know, whether that be government officials or just some case ordinary South Africans, that for them is what feels like a frustrating thing, is that even if you want to accept that in America, maybe some of these... initiatives, these laws and policies don't stack up.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
They're saying, look, we have our own unique history here, a history where most people still have a living memory of apartheid because it's only 31 years ago. That legacy is so baked in here that we clearly have to do things to change that. And that we also have a majority black population, an 80% black population that continues to struggle, that continues to suffer.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
And so our context is a little bit different.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
Because in reality, these are simply not analogous societies.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
And there's also been talk about economically what it could do to the country, that the country could be overburdened and overwhelmed with foreigners, and that can really hamper the country rather than help it.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
Yeah, for a lot of Black South Africans to see Afrikaners being labeled as the persecuted people in their society, it just is shocking and flies in the face of their reality as they describe it. A lot of Black South Africans will say, you know, life here continues to be very difficult. Unemployment is very high. Crime is really bad. When people do find jobs, you know, the wages aren't very good.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
They don't have stable housing. So the truth is a lot of black South Africans, if they had a chance to go to the U.S. as refugees, they probably would love to take up that offer.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
But there is no such offer. And I think a lot of Black South Africans, they feel that for the Trump administration, this is not about how much someone is suffering, but it's about the type of person they want in their country.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
And ultimately, that makes it no longer about persecution. but about who fits the image that this administration wants to see in the country.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
And that image is somebody who's white. Somebody who's white. Well, John, thank you very much. Thank you, Michael.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
Right. And I think that brings us to this very surprising scene we saw just a few days ago.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
Here's what else you need to know today. On Sunday, Israel began extensive ground operations in Gaza involving tens of thousands of soldiers. Officials said the operation has multiple objectives, to force Hamas to release the dozens of Israeli hostages that it still holds, to pressure the group into a new ceasefire, or to force it to finally surrender.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
Israeli officials say that the new campaign will be carried out gradually in stages and that it could be stopped at any moment if a deal is reached with Hamas. And former President Joe Biden has been diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer, an aggressive form of the disease that has now spread to his bones.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
But Biden's doctors said that they believed, for now, that his cancer could be effectively managed. Today's episode was produced by Nina Feldman, Mary Wilson, Shannon Lin, and Sydney Harper. It was edited by M.J. Davis-Lynn and Lexi Diao. Contains original music by Alishaba Etube, Rowe Namisto, Marion Lozano, and Pat McCusker. And was engineered by Chris Wood.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderland. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Bavaro. See you tomorrow.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
We had dozens of refugees arriving at Dulles Airport, and they certainly did not look like all of those who'd been suspended from coming.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
So these were white South Africans, specifically Afrikaners, who are an ethnic minority in South Africa.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
They had a lot of luggage, you know, all their belongings. They came into an airport hangar, and they were given this big reception by some of the top officials in the U.S. government welcoming them here.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
So about a month after Trump signed that executive order suspending the refugee program, he signed another executive order that essentially allowed this group of Afrikaners to come to the United States as refugees. So essentially what Trump was saying was that they can open the refugee program for this small group of white South Africans, but them alone.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
So what's the story of how this group of white South Africans somehow becomes the single exception to President Trump's deeply skeptical relationship to refugees? The one group that gets through.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
Well, let me tell you a little bit about the Afrikaners, Michael, because it goes back a long way. So back in 1652, Jan van Riebeck was a Dutch settler who sort of started the colonial settlement of what's now South Africa. And over time, these Dutch settlers, as well as other settlers from Germany, from France and other parts of Europe, would come in.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
And out of that would sort of rise this new ethnicity called Afrikaners, which is a mix of these various, you know, European settlers who came in and settled there. And pretty early on, you know, with the locals who were already in South Africa at the time, there were clashes, right? I mean, there were fights over land. There were struggles and tensions.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
And the story gets even more complicated over the years as the British come to South Africa, right? And while the British... took a lot of the economic power in the country, the Afrikaners amassed political power. And so then came elections in 1948, which Black people were not allowed to participate in. And in that election, an Afrikaner-led party won control of the government.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
And once they took power, they created a system that we all know today, that system of apartheid.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
So Afrikaners end up becoming the group that enforces the really brutal rules of segregation that come to define South Africa.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
Yes, Michael. So they essentially formed this government that relegates Black South Africans, the majority population, to essentially subhuman status. They kick them off their land. They force them to live in these ramshackle townships that got no resources, oftentimes didn't have water or electricity or anything like that.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
Their movements, the movements of the black majority, were very tightly controlled. They needed special passes if they wanted to go into cities or towns. The areas with the most arable farmland, those were not areas where black people were allowed to settle. Those were areas that the white population was able to take over. And this system ruled.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
for nearly 50 years until the early 1990s when you started to see much of the world turn against the system. And you started to see this sort of crumble and the Afrikaners had to sort of give way to the black majority.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
And what does that look like for the Afrikaners who have amassed so much power to have to give it up?
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
So toward the end of the apartheid system, there were vigorous negotiations over what the Afrikaners would give up, what they would keep, and what black people would get. And essentially, what was negotiated at the time was a system in which Black people would get their political power. But through those negotiations, Afrikaners were not really forced to give up their economic status.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
They were not forced to give up land. Essentially, it was a relatively peaceful transition.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
It sounds like they're treated surprisingly well, given the circumstances of what they had inflicted on the majority that's now suddenly in power.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
Exactly. And to this day in South Africa, you will hear one of the big criticisms about Nelson Mandela, who was the hero of the anti-apartheid movement as much of the world knows him,
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
is that he did not do enough to aggressively force a change, that you essentially had the system where a small percentage of white people held most of the wealth, where you had this large population of black people who were still in poverty and did not have much wealth at all. Right, even after apartheid. Exactly, exactly. And Mandela's whole thing was that he wanted to avoid a civil war.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
He wanted to build a country... in which everyone could coexist alongside each other, right? So you had this transition where the idea was that you sort of allow everyone to have their own piece of society. Now, from the beginning, you had this great fear among white South Africans, right?
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
That things would go horribly wrong, that they would be hunted in the streets and that they would have to, you know, migrate, you know, run out of the country and leave very quickly. And you did indeed have white South Africans who left the country. But there was no mass confiscation of white-owned land. There was no mass firing of white people. That never happened.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
So how do these Afrikaners, who are largely being spared major dislocation and change, how do they ever qualify as refugees in the eyes of the United States? They seem like the exact opposite so far in the story of refugees.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
Hi, good to be here. I don't know if you remember this, but the last time we spoke was four years ago, almost to the month, because in the middle of the interview, my wife began to give birth to our son.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
Yeah, I think you have to look at what it's like to give up power, right? So you have, yes, Matt Mandela is framing it as, you know, building a nation together. But part of that is having to do practical things in order to ensure that a population, the black majority, had access to opportunities that they didn't have before.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
So that meant looking at things like affirmative action to ensure that companies are hiring black people. And then there was, of course, the issue of land.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
And this is one in which the government tried to say to the white landowners who owned almost all of the land, hey, we'll pay you if you can give us some of that land so we can redistribute it to our Black population, to people who've worked on the land and lived on the land for years but never got a chance to own it. So it was called a willing buyer, willing seller program.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
And how much do the Afrikaners end up being willing to sell the land?
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
There was a degree of selling, but not nearly as much as I think the government wanted. And so you take that over time, and what you see is that there's these flashpoints happening around land. And what are some of those flashpoints? In the mid to late 90s, shortly after the end of apartheid, you start to see this uptick in murders on farms.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
And this is where we really see the foundations of this argument that Afrikaners are a persecuted people.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
What you had was essentially a lot of violence in the country as a whole. And as part of that violence, you had murders happening on farms. A lot of black South Africans have felt that the pace of change, the pace of ownership of land has not changed quickly enough.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
She went into labor, and we did not finish the conversation.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
You see things where there are communities around some of these farms where people who are still living in shacks and living in poor dwellings might just go and invade land.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
Well, hopefully we don't have that problem again this time.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
Automatically, those things kind of become racialized, right? They become seen as sort of a broader effort to target white people, to target white farm owners and to take the land from them.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
No, no, no chance. So, on to the topic at hand. John, since taking office, the Trump administration has really systematically shut down the programs that designate and bring refugees into the United States from around the world. And then a few days ago, the White House made a pretty big exception to that. But I want you to just start with the shutting down process for just a moment.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
We haven't done anything to anybody. Why?
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
So you have this population that has just lost power. And they'd already been thinking that the black majority was going to come after them at the end of apartheid. But now you see this increase in violence on farms, and it's just like for many Afrikaners, their worst fear is coming true.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
But I think it's important to note that the police statistics show that there is not and has never been mass killings of white farmers in In fact, the farm murders account for only a very tiny percentage of the overall killings in South Africa. And on top of that, if you look at who is killed on farms, they tend to be farm workers or the people who are living there.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
And those people tend to be black. But even so, this fear had taken hold among Afrikaners. And this is when we really start seeing their journey toward identifying as a persecuted people begin to play out.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
And how does that get on the radar of Donald Trump?
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
So over many years, you had Afrikaners who were going around the world and lobbying to They were writing reports, laying out their calculations of how many people were getting killed on farms. They were creating lists of what they called quote-unquote race laws, which are laws that they felt were essentially discriminating against white people.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
And they got that message around to as many people as they could. And eventually, they made their way to Washington, where in 2018... some prominent Afrikaner activists appeared on Tucker Carlson's show.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
Hmm. Traditionally, a pretty useful gateway to Donald Trump's brain.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
The president of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, has begun... Tucker Carlson essentially ran a segment saying Afrikaners are having their land taken. that they are victims of reverse discrimination.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
And that they are the ones who are being persecuted.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
And sure enough, just hours after Tucker ran that program on his Fox News show, President Trump tweeted about Afrikaners. And in his tweet, he said he was ordering the then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to investigate the mass killings of Afrikaners and the seizure of their land. So these were sort of the two big talking points.
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
that had formed the basis of Afrikaner lobbying to say we're a persecuted people, that we're getting killed on our land and we're getting it taken away from us. And now suddenly, the most powerful man in the world was endorsing those two theories. And if you think about it, this is the perfect thing to capture Trump's eye. Because if we look at his ascendancy to the presidency,
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
Part of his whole pitch was to be this president who would ensure that the forgotten white man would be taken care of, right? That we would fight back against sort of this demographic shift, these demographic changes, these brown people coming into our country and invading our borders. And so...
The Daily
No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.
Trump's presidency and his whole political identity has always had an element that has really spoken to the folks all around the world who embrace these sort of theories, these feelings that white people are under threat. And so here he had an example. South Africa could now be the example that he points to and says, like, this is what could come for us here in America.