Trump Clashes With South African President As He Alleges White Farmer Genocide
President Trump and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa had a heated exchange Wednesday in the Oval Office after Trump alleged there is a genocide taking place against white farmers in South Africa.
The president had the lights turned down in the Oval Office and played videos showing alleged evidence of the systemic murder of Afrikaners —South Africans who primarily descended from Dutch and northern European colonists who settled in South Africa in the 17th century.
A spokesman for Ramaphosa suggested it was an “ambush,” saying the meeting’s format changed at the last minute.
It’s giving us flashbacks to the heated meeting with Ukraine’s President Zelensky in February… this one stayed cooler, though.
Trump has claimed white farmers in South Africa are victims of genocide — a charge Ramaphosa, the country's courts and even some white farmers dispute. Ramaphosa has denied any systemic discrimination, though that has been race-based violence directed at Afrikaners. The tense meeting between the two leaders follows the Trump administration accepting 59 white South Africans last week as refugees — critics point out that the move is contradictory to Trump’s calls to tighten immigration from other countries.
INSIDE THE ALLEGATIONS
Some Afrikaners have said they face violence and discrimination from the post-apartheid government, including a law Ramaphosa signed in January that allows authorities to seize privately-owned land without compensation when it is deemed in the public interest.
During the Oval Office exchange, Ramaphosa noted that the violence white farmers face in South Africa is no different from the violence experienced by Black South Africans.
The country has the fifth-highest crime rate in the world. Of nearly 30,000 homicides in South Africa in 2023, only about 50 of those murders took place on farms, affecting farmers of all racial groups, according to the Afrikaner group AfriForum.
“There is criminality in our country. People who do get killed, unfortunately, through criminal activity, are not only white people. The majority of them are Black people,” Ramaphosa said Wednesday.
How we got here: Racial tensions in South Africa are deep-rooted. Apartheid, a racist system that kept Black South Africans separate from white people, formally began in 1948 and didn’t end until 1994.
Still, white South Africans make-up about 7% of the country’s population, with the majority Afrikaners, and own 70% of the nation’s land.
Many Afrikaners are closely involved in farming today and their ancestors played a major role in designing and upholding South Africa’s former system of white minority rule.
TRUMP STEPS IN
In February, Trump issued an executive order that cut U.S. financial aid to South Africa for the country’s “unjust racial discrimination” and granted refugee status for Afrikaners.
Trump’s interest in the alleged genocide seems to have been inspired by Elon Musk, who was born in South Africa, and has repeatedly claimed there is a genocide against white people there. Musk’s own platform has taken to the cause.
THE GROK OF IT
Grok, the chatbot created by Musk’s artificial intelligence company and featured on X, has recently been responding to users with information about “white genocide” in South Africa, even when prompted about an unrelated topic.
The company said last week that a “rogue employee” had programmed the unauthorized code to occur.
