Trump Ambushes South African President with Video, Claims of Anti-White Racism

By Staff, Agencies.

US President Donald Trump ambushed the South African president, Cyril Ramaphosa, by playing him a video that he falsely claimed proved genocide was being committed against white people under “the opposite of apartheid”.

The hectoring stunt on Wednesday set up the tensest Oval Office encounter since Trump’s bullying of Vladimir Zelensky in February. But Ramaphosa – who earlier said that he had come to Washington to “reset” the relationship between the two countries – refused to take the bait and suggested that they “talk about it very calmly”.

Trump has long maintained that Afrikaners, a minority descended from mainly Dutch colonists who ruled South Africa during its decades of racial apartheid, are being persecuted. South Africa rejects the allegation.

What began as a convivial meeting at the White House, including lighthearted quips about golf, took a sudden turn when Ramaphosa told Trump there is no genocide against Afrikaners.

The video included footage of former South African president Jacob Zuma and firebrand opposition politician Julius Malema singing an apartheid-era struggle song called Kill the Boer, which means farmer or Afrikaner, as supporters danced.

Ramaphosa quietly but firmly pushed back, pointing out that the views expressed in the video are not government policy.

There was also footage that Trump claimed showed the graves of more than a thousand white farmers, marked by white crosses.

Trump then produced a batch of newspaper articles that he said were from the last few days reporting on killings in South Africa. He read some of the headlines and commented: “Death, death, death, horrible death.”

Ramaphosa acknowledged there is crime in South Africa and said the majority of victims were Black. Trump cut him off and said: “The farmers are not Black.”

Trump kept returning to the theme during Wednesday’s televised meeting. He said: “Now I will say, apartheid: terrible. That was the biggest threat. That was reported all the time. This is sort of the opposite of apartheid.

“What’s happening now is never reported. Nobody knows about it. All we know is we’re being inundated with people, with white farmers from South Africa, and it’s a big problem.”

He added: “They’re white farmers, and they’re fleeing South Africa, and it’s a very sad thing to see. But I hope we can have an explanation of that, because I know you don’t want that.”

The meeting came days after about 50 Afrikaners arrived in the US to take up Trump’s offer of “refuge”.

NAACP President Derrick Johnson said of the meeting: “There’s no limit to how far Donald Trump will go to divide people on the basis of race. It’s frankly disgusting to hear the President of the United States — in the Oval Office — promote lies and propaganda. It’s shameful and appalling.”

Later, at a press conference in a Washington hotel, Ramaphosa claimed the visit had been a success for trade and investment – and rejected Trump’s comparison with the apartheid era.

“There’s just no genocide in South Africa and of course it is an issue of how one looks at it,” he said. “As they say, sometimes the shape of the mountain depends on which point or direction you’re looking at it. In this case we cannot equate what is alleged to be genocide to what we went through in the struggle because people were killed, because of the oppression that was taking place in our country.”

However, Ramaphosa suggested that Trump remains open to persuasion, telling reporters.