NEW YORK — US President Donald Trump on Friday ordered that all foreign assistance to South Africa be halted and said his administration would prioritise the resettling of white, "Afrikaner refugees" into the United States because of what he called actions by the country's government that "racially disfavoured landowners."
In the order, Trump said that "the United States shall not provide aid or assistance to South Africa" and that US officials should do everything possible to help "Afrikaners in South Africa who are victims of unjust racial discrimination."
The order follows Trump's accusation on his social media site Sunday that the South African government was engaged in a "massive Human Rights VIOLATION, at a minimum." He vowed a full investigation and promised to cut off aid.
"South Africa is confiscating land, and treating certain classes of people VERY BADLY," the president wrote in the post. "It is a bad situation that the Radical Left Media doesn't want to so much as mentioned."
Trump has made repeated claims without evidence that echoed long-held conspiracy theories about the treatment of white landowners in South Africa. In 2018, he ordered his secretary of state to look into "the large scale killing of farmers" — a claim disputed by official figures and the country’s biggest farmers group.
Trump's recent comments were in reference to a policy that President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa signed into law last month.
The law, known as the Expropriation Bill, repeals an apartheid-era act and allows the government in certain instances to acquire privately held land in the public interest without paying compensation — something that can only be done after a justification process subject to judicial review.
The order from Trump came a day after Ramaphosa delivered his State of the Nation Address with a defiance that appeared to be a reference to the US president’s accusations.
"We will not be bullied," he said.
In addition to the halt in foreign aid, Trump ordered officials to provide "humanitarian" assistance to Afrikaners and to allow members of the white South African minority to seek refuge in the United States through the American refugee program.
In an earlier executive order, Trump had demanded a three-month pause in the United States’ refugee program, blocking the admission of desperate people fleeing war, economic strife, natural disasters or political persecution. Friday's order appeared to make white South Africans an exception to the broader halt.
While it is not clear whether he had an influence on the president's order, Elon Musk, the billionaire who has become a close adviser to the president, is from South Africa. In 2023, Musk posted similar far-right conspiracy claims about South Africa on X, the social media platform he owns, formerly called Twitter.
"They are openly pushing for genocide of white people in South Africa," Musk wrote.
In much of South Africa, Trump's attacks in recent days inspired a rare bit of political unity, with leftist, centrist and even some far-right activists all saying that the US president's characterisation of the law was wrong. There is agreement across much of the political spectrum that the government has not been confiscating land from white owners.
Trump's post has inflamed fissures within South African society. His comments amplified a long-held grievance among some white South Africans who claim that they have been discriminated against by the Black-led government after apartheid. But Trump's comments also angered many South Africans, who saw the law as a necessary means of redressing historical injustice.
South Africa's colonial regimes were particularly brutal in dispossessing Black people of their land and forcefully removing them. The result remains clear to this day: White South Africans, who make up 7% of the population, own farmland that covers about 50% of the country's territory.
Since 1994, when South Africa became a democracy, the country has enjoyed a close relationship with the United States. Barack Obama visited there several times during his presidency, including when he attended the memorial service for Nelson Mandela, who had been imprisoned for 27 years before becoming the country's president.
But Trump's actions Friday made it clear that he does not view the relationship in the same way.
South Africa received more than US$400 million in aid from the United States in 2023, almost all of which went to funding efforts to fight the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (Aids). The government has said that American funding makes up about 17% of its budget for battling HIV.
Far-right white Afrikaners applauded Trump's attacks on South Africa's governments in recent days.
Ernst Roets, the executive director of the Afrikaner Foundation, which lobbies for international support of the interests of Afrikaners, said that while the government was not seizing land, it was trying to create a legal and policy framework to be able to do so.
The expropriation law opens the door to abuse, Roets said, because the government "can justify a lot of things under the banner of public interest."
But even Roets and his group had not called on Trump to broadly cut aid to South Africa, instead seeking targeted actions against government leaders.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.