Trump Casts Himself as a Protector of Persecuted White People

In the Oval Office on Wednesday, 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 to violent crime than other people in South Africa.

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, 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 received 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.

Invoking the teachings of his old mentor, Nelson Mandela, Mr. Ramaphosa pleaded for civility in the dialogue between the two leaders.

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 into 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 accused 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 in 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.

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.”

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