“White genocide”: The ambush of the South African president at the White House is another international fiasco

President Donald Trump welcomed his South African counterpart, Cyril Ramaphosa, to the White House for a visit meant to ease tensions between the two countries.

Trump ambushes South African president with video and false claims of anti-white racism

— The Guardian (@theguardian.com) 2025-05-21T23:38:34Z

However, Trump may have been setting a trap, which many observers compared to the one he had brutally set for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a few months earlier.

It didn’t take long for Donald Trump to go on the offensive during his meeting with the South African president. During the meeting in the Oval Office, the lights were turned off to show a video in which a member of a South African opposition party sang a song calling for the death of Afrikaners, the term used to describe South Africa’s white farmers. The footage also included unverified images purporting to show a mass grave where white farmers were buried.

Ramaphosa vigorously refuted these accusations, pointing out that the chants and words broadcast in the video in no way represent the government’s position, and reminding us that criminal acts affect all South African communities, without distinction.

The South African president then asserted that he had never seen the images of the mass grave in question, and asked his American counterpart for details of their origin, in particular the exact location where they were allegedly filmed, so that he could verify their authenticity. Donald Trump dismissed the question as unimportant.

It should be remembered that Donald Trump has been targeted for several years by the lobbying efforts of AfriForum, a South African organization representing the interests of the Afrikaner minority.

Although this group refrains from explicitly using the term “white genocide”, its campaigns highlight accounts of persecution targeting white farmers. In fact, it was a video produced by AfriForum that Trump chose to broadcast in front of the South African president during their meeting.

This far-right rhetoric was also echoed by former Fox News star Tucker Carlson, who was instrumental in spreading the “white farmer genocide” theory in the US.

Elon Musk, too, has played a role in this amplification. A native of South Africa and now an influential advisor to Donald Trump, Musk has taken up these “white genocide” allegations, notably through his artificial intelligence chatbot, Grok, which has been roundly criticized for propagating unfounded claims of allegedly targeted violence against whites in South Africa.

This content was created with the help of AI.