Trump's Fabricated 'White Genocide' Ambush of Ramaphosa in the Oval Office

On May 21, 2025, a routine bilateral meeting between President Donald Trump and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa turned into a televised confrontation built around a claim that has circulated in far-right circles for years but has never held up to scrutiny: that white South African farmers are being systematically killed in a “genocide.”

Midway through the meeting, Trump had aides dim the Oval Office lights and play a video montage. Part of it showed South African opposition leader Julius Malema, head of the Economic Freedom Fighters, leading crowds in the decades-old anti-apartheid chant “Kill the Boer,” which Trump and his aides presented as evidence of a governing-party campaign against white Afrikaners, despite Malema’s party holding no role in Ramaphosa’s government and South African courts having previously ruled the chant, however inflammatory, does not constitute incitement to violence under law. Trump also handed Ramaphosa a stack of printed news articles, one of which included a screenshot he described as showing the burial of murdered white farmers. Reuters’ own fact-checkers later traced that image to the news agency’s own video, filmed by journalist Djaffar Al Katanty and published in February 2025, showing humanitarian workers loading body bags in Goma, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, during the aftermath of an M23 rebel assault on the city, more than 2,000 miles from South Africa and unconnected to any farm killing. The article that packaged the image, published by the conservative outlet American Thinker, had itself misidentified the footage; its author later acknowledged to Reuters that the photo had been “misidentified.”

Ramaphosa, appearing alongside a delegation that included white members of his own cabinet and South Africa’s best-known golfers, pushed back in real time, telling Trump the video did not reflect government policy and that “our government policy is completely, completely against what he was saying,” while noting South Africa’s constitution and multiparty democracy explicitly reject violence of any kind. He also noted that South Africa’s actual crime crisis affects South Africans of every race overwhelmingly, not a single group. That point is borne out by the country’s own police statistics: government crime data for the period from April through December 2024 recorded 36 murders classified as farm-linked out of roughly 19,700 murders nationwide, about 0.2 percent of the total, while AfriForum, an Afrikaner civil rights group that tracks the issue independently and has long argued farm attacks are undercounted, put the yearly figure at around 50, still a small fraction of the country’s overall homicide rate, one of the highest in the world for reasons criminologists tie broadly to poverty and inequality rather than racial targeting.

The meeting took place against the backdrop of an escalating dispute over South Africa’s Expropriation Act, signed by Ramaphosa in January 2025, which allows the state to expropriate land without compensation only in narrow circumstances, such as unused or abandoned property, and which the South African government has said explicitly has not resulted in any farm seizures to date. Trump had cited the law weeks earlier when he signed an executive order in February 2025 cutting aid to South Africa and offering an expedited refugee pathway to Afrikaner farmers, a program a few dozen families accepted in the following months. Elon Musk, who was born and raised in South Africa and has repeatedly claimed on his own social media platform that white South Africans face government-sanctioned discrimination, attended the Oval Office meeting in person, standing near the sofas as the exchange unfolded. South Africa’s opposition leader Malema, for his part, separately criticized Ramaphosa’s government in the run-up to the visit for what he called excessive deference to Trump and Musk rather than pursuing the dispute through formal diplomatic channels.