Chuck Darwin (@cdarwin@c.im)

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 most tense Oval Office encounter since Trump’s bullying of Volodymyr Zelenskyy 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”. 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. Trump said, “We have thousands of stories talking about it,” then ordered his staff: “Turn the lights down and just put this on.” Sitting next to Trump before the fireplace, Ramaphosa forced a smile and turned to look at a big TV screen as Trump’s South Africa-born billionaire ally Elon Musk, JD Vance, the defence secretary Pete Hegseth, and diplomats and journalists from both countries looked on. 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. Ramaphosa, who had mostly sat expressionless, occasionally craning his neck to look, said he had not seen that before and would like to find out what the location was. 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.” The conspiracy theory of a white genocide has long been a staple of the racist far right, and in recent years has been amplified by Musk and rightwing media personality Tucker Carlson. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/21/trump-south-africa-president-meeting?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other