NEW YORK — President Donald Trump confronted South African President Cyril Ramaphosa on Wednesday with claims that white farmers are being targeted and killed in the country. Trump’s main evidence, compiled in a video shown during their Oval Office meeting: Speeches by a politician who was kicked out of Ramaphosa’s party, is not part of the coalition that governs the country and whose own political movement garnered less than 10% of the vote in last year’s elections.
The Trump administration has used the rhetoric of a fringe politician and South Africa’s endemic violence as justification for allowing white South Africans to apply to become refugees in the United States, even as the country has stopped accepting all other refugees and seeks to oust from the country immigrants such as Afghans who assisted the U.S. military.
Some of Trump’s allies have seized on Julius Malema’s far-left Economic Freedom Fighters to argue that South Africa is engaged in genocide against white farmers, a contention that seemed to baffle Malema’s main political rival, Ramaphosa, during his Oval Office visit. Ramaphosa repeatedly stressed that EFF is “a small minority party.”
Trump seems to be relying on representations from certain wealthy white South Africans, including his close adviser, Elon Musk, who was at Wednesday’s meeting and has repeatedly posted clips of Malema singing an old anti-apartheid song with the lyrics “kill the Boer” and “shoot the Boer” on his X account. Boer refers to the country’s white farmers.
“Very few people know that there is a major political party in South Africa that is actively promoting white genocide,” the Tesla and SpaceX CEO posted in March alongside a video of the song. “Where is the outrage? Why is there no coverage by the legacy media?”
When a reporter asked Trump for his view on whether a genocide is underway in South Africa, he said, “I haven’t made up my mind.”
The Oval Office video ended with an aerial shot of a line of white crosses along a road that Trump claimed showed burial sites for white farmers killed in South Africa. Local news reports from the country show that the crosses instead were part of a demonstration in 2020 after a white couple was killed on their farm. The video gained new life earlier this year and has been posted by Musk.
Ramaphosa seemed baffled by the video, turning to Trump as it was being shown before saying, “I’d like to know where that is, because this I’ve never seen.”
The crosses resemble those featured on a hillside memorial in South Africa that claims to mark about 3,000 killings of white farmers in a country that registers more than 20,000 murders a year.
Ramaphosa noted that most murder victims in South Africa are Black. He said that if Trump listened to “the voices of South Africans,” he would better understand the situation. A visibly frustrated Trump countered that “we have thousands of stories,” and then confronted Ramaphosa with video of Malema calling for Black South Africans to take over land even if the president tells them they cannot.
“That is not government policy,” Ramaphosa protested. “Our government policy is completely against what he is saying, even in the Parliament.”
Ramaphosa’s agricultural minister, John Steenhuisen, who is white, added that he had joined the governing coalition to make sure “that lot” never gains power in South Africa.
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Riccardi reported from Denver and Magome from Johannesburg. Associated Press writer Melissa Goldin also contributed.
