President Trump is offering to resettle white South Africans in the US, and his white South African bestie may have something to do with it. This episode was produced by Avishay Artsy and Travis Larchuk, edited by Miranda Kennedy and Jolie Myers, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Patrick Boyd and Andrea Kristinsdottir, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members Tech billionaire Elon Musk in the Oval Office of the White House. Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What are the current issues facing white South Africans?
The South African situation is very, very dangerous and very bad for a lot of people. There's tremendously bad things going on, including the confiscation of property and worse, much worse than that. You know what I'm talking about.
You might not know what he's talking about. We got you. President Trump says that Afrikaners, white South Africans who decades ago architected a brutal system of segregation laws known as apartheid, are now themselves victims of discrimination after the passage of a law that allows their land to be expropriated without compensation.
Trump is offering these white South Africans resettlement in the U.S. and they are gently turning him down.
We see our future in Africa.
But what got Trump interested in South Africa? And is it unelected white South African Vice President Elon Musk? We're going to ask on Today Explained.
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This is Today Explained. I'm Noelle King with Chris McGreal. Chris is a reporter for The Guardian who covered South Africa for many years, including the end of apartheid and the start of South Africa's democracy. Recently, Chris wrote a piece about the influential white South Africans in President Trump's orbit.
The argument is being made that Afrikaners who were the group that imposed apartheid on South Africa in 1948, the very rigid form of racial segregation, are now victims of the post-apartheid era, that they're being targeted with…
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Chapter 2: Why is Trump interested in white South Africans?
They laid out the case that whites were the victims of discrimination in South Africa, but particularly latched onto this issue of the killing of white farmers.
Basically threatening white farmers that if they do not voluntarily hand over their land to black people, then there would be a violent takeover. So the situation is very dire in South Africa. They would be tortured to death and it would receive very little news coverage.
Which is totally untrue. But they appeared on Tucker Carlson. Trump was watching. This is when he's president in 2018. And he tweets to his then Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, telling him to watch the situation in South Africa with the whites and how they're being victimized. And others pick up on this around the states afterwards. And it starts to gain some momentum.
In the meantime, President Trump has become very close to Elon Musk, who, of course, is a white South African. Do we know whether Elon Musk's ideas about South Africa have influenced Donald Trump at all?
Well, you'd have to assume they did because there's no real explanation otherwise as to why Trump is so engaged with this issue. Why, you know, three weeks into his second term of office, he's suddenly issuing this executive order about one country. So one has to imagine that it's Elon Musk who was born in apartheid South Africa and grew up there, left at 18. But he's not the only one.
There's a group of white men that all have apartheid South African childhoods in some form or other. known as the PayPal mafia. They all get to know each other at the top of PayPal. They all get rich through PayPal. These include the billionaire libertarian Peter Thiel. Now, Thiel was born in Germany, but his father took him to South Africa at a young age.
And then the other kind of two major players are a guy called David Sachs, who is another tech billionaire. He's now Trump's AI and crypto czar. He was born in Cape Town, although his parents moved to Tennessee when he was five. So he did not grow up fully kind of imbued with the apartheid system, although he grew up in the white South African diaspora of the time.
What would life have been like in the 1980s for a kid like Elon Musk growing up under apartheid? What was the deal?
It separated every aspect of life. So jobs were reserved only for white people. Interracial marriage and interracial sex was illegal under the Immorality Act. Every aspect of daily life was separate. But Musk's teenage years would have been in a huge tumult of South Africa's uprising against apartheid.
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