President Donald Trump reignited international controversy Wednesday by playing a misleading video and repeating discredited claims of a “white genocide” in South Africa during a tense Oval Office meeting with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa.
The confrontation began after Trump was asked what it would take to abandon his claims that white Afrikaners are being targeted for violence. Ramaphosa refuted the assertion, saying crime in South Africa affects all races and the majority of victims are Black.
Trump then played a four-minute video featuring inflammatory rhetoric and images purporting to show mass graves of white farmers — footage that has since been traced to misrepresented or unrelated events, including a tribute to a slain couple and footage from the Congo.
Trump claimed the video depicted a stadium of “100,000 people” chanting anti-white slogans, calling it evidence of “very bad” conditions and land seizures. Ramaphosa and South Africa’s agriculture minister pushed back, noting that the individuals in the video were from fringe opposition parties and that no land seizures have occurred under the government’s land reform laws.
Fact-checkers found no evidence of mass killings or genocide targeting white South Africans. Violent crime in South Africa is widespread but not disproportionately aimed at whites. According to the New York Times, only 53 of 225 farm murder victims in recent years were white farmers.
Trump administration officials have used the claims to justify prioritizing white South African refugees, despite pausing protections for refugees from war-torn nations like Afghanistan. Critics, including journalists and South African officials, say the claims echo longstanding white nationalist conspiracy theories and distort the country’s complex history of apartheid and land inequality.
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