Trump ambushes South African President with false claims of white genocide during White House visit

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U.S. President Donald Trump publicly ambushed South African President Cyril Ramaphosa at a White House meeting on Wednesday, falsely claiming the latter‘s government had “executed” white farmers to expropriate their land.

In an extraordinary Oval Office scene, Mr. Trump launched an apparently pre-planned attack of his South African counterpart while television cameras rolled. Using both a movie and a stack of articles, Mr. Trump accused Mr. Ramaphosa of perpetrating a program of violent seizures of white-owned farms in his country.

“You‘re taking people’s land away from them,” Mr. Trump said. “And those people, in many cases, are being executed, they’re being executed, and they happen to be white and most of them happen to be farmers.”

As Mr. Ramaphosa tried to protest “no, no,” Mr. Trump claimed that “when they take the land, they kill the white farmer. And when they kill the white farmer, nothing happens to them.”

The South African leader had asked for the White House meeting in a bid to ease tensions. Instead, the U.S. President used the opportunity to escalate his attacks with a confrontation reminiscent of his infamous berating of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office in February.

Mr. Trump and Elon Musk, his South African-born adviser, have accused South Africa of perpetrating “genocide” against white Afrikaner farmers, picking up a long-debunked claim. Mr. Trump has cut off aid to South Africa, expelled the country’s ambassador and ordered an airlift of Afrikaners, to whom he granted refugee status even as he has frozen all other refugee admissions to the U.S.

Mr. Ramaphosa came to the meeting armed with trade proposals in a bid to head off Mr. Trump’s planned tariffs and turn discussions to economic matters. He also brought with him a book about the country’s golf courses to tempt Mr. Trump to attend November‘s G20 summit in Johannesburg.

“We are here to reset the relationship between the United States and South Africa,” Mr. Ramaphosa declared early in the meeting, whose first 20 minutes passed without incident as he frequently praised Mr. Trump.

But after Mr. Ramaphosa said Mr. Trump would have to “listen to the voices of South Africans” to realize that there is no genocide, Mr. Trump signalled for his staff to dim the lights and play a movie.

The four-minute video mostly consisted of incendiary clips of Julius Malema, the leader of a South African opposition party, shouting “kill the Boer” and declaring his movement is “cutting the throat of whiteness.” One clip depicted former South African president Jacob Zuma singing about shooting Boers. Another showed rows of white crosses, which Mr. Trump said marked the graves of murdered farmers.

Afterward, Mr. Trump flipped through what he indicated were news clippings about South African farm murders. “Deaths of people. Death. Death. Death. Horrible death,” he said. One of the articles he said depicted the burials of white farmers actually showed a photograph of Red Cross workers in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Mr. Trump incorrectly described Mr. Malema and Mr. Zuma as government “officials.” Both were expelled from Mr. Ramaphosa’s ruling African National Congress, now lead opposition parties and are virulent enemies of the current administration.

It was unclear where the video of the crosses came from, but it resembles South African monuments of symbolic crosses planted to mark the killings of farmers, both white and Black.

Asked whether he denounced Mr. Malema and Mr. Zuma’s rhetoric, Mr. Ramaphosa replied: “Oh yes. As a government, as a party, we are completely against that.”

For much of the meeting, he alternated between pushing back on Mr. Trump’s claims and attempting to lighten the mood. “People get killed criminally in our country, a majority of them are Black people,” he said at one point. At another, he cracked a joke about Mr. Trump’s plan to accept an airplane from the Qatari royal family. “I’m sorry I don’t have a plane to give you,” he said, to Mr. Trump’s apparent amusement.

South African Agriculture Minister John Steenhuisen, leader of the Democratic Alliance, the country’s second-largest political party, rejected Mr. Trump’s assertion that attacking farmers was government policy.

He said he wanted to make attacks on farms “a priority crime” and said the reason he entered a coalition with the ANC was to stop people such as Mr. Malema and Mr. Zuma. “The reason my party chose to join hands with Mr. Ramaphosa’s party was precisely to keep those people out of power,” said Mr. Steenhuisen, who is white.

Zingiswa Losi, the head of a South African trade union group, described rural crime in the country perpetrated against Black people. “There is no doubt we are a violent nation,” she said. “It is not necessarily about race, it is about crime.”

Mr. Musk attended the meeting but was mostly silent.

There is no evidence of racial motivations behind South Africa’s violent crime epidemic. The overwhelming majority of murder victims in the country are Black. The white minority still controls most of the country’s corporate wealth and more than 70 per cent of farmland despite comprising seven per cent of the population.

Earlier this year, Mr. Ramaphosa approved a law, which has not yet come into effect, to allow the government to expropriate private property for public purposes. In almost all cases, such expropriations would require compensation to the landowner. It does, however, allow for rare cases in which the government could expropriate land without compensation if the land is not being used.

So far, the country has not expropriated any land without compensation since the end of the Apartheid era in 1994.

With a report from Geoffrey York in Johannesburg