President Donald Trump derailed a meeting with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa on Wednesday, halting their talk in the Oval Office to play a video about an alleged “white genocide” in Ramaphosa’s country.
While taking questions from reporters, Trump played footage of white crosses along a rural highway in South Africa. The crosses represent the victims of farm attacks in the country since 1990. South Africa-born Trump adviser Elon Musk has been extremely vocal about the plight of white South Africans and seemingly prompted his social media chatbot Grok to promote the idea earlier this month.
“Over a thousand white farmers and those cars are lined up to pay love on a Sunday morning. Each one of those white things you see is a cross, and there are approximately a thousand of them,” Trump said, erroneously, before falsely claiming that the monument was a mass grave.
The United States admitted several dozen Afrikaners as refugees earlier this month. The truth of farm murders in the country doesn’t bear out their story. Of the 225 murders reported on farms in the last four years, only 53 of those were white farmers.
South African officials have continuously denied claims of genocide from the country’s white Afrikaner population. Those claims have grown louder in recent months, after South Africa passed a law allowing the government to expropriate rural land that was not in use. Ramaphosa has defended the law as a move toward racial equity in a country where a white minority owns nearly half of all farmland.
At the meeting on Tuesday, Ramaphosa repeatedly questioned Trump’s assumptions. When the meeting grew tense after a reporter asked about Trump’s gifted plane from Qatar, Ramaphosa offered a mocking apology.
“I’m sorry I don’t have a plane to give you,” he said.
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