President Trump asked an aide to dim the lights of the Oval Office, and then, with a line of reporters in the room, proceeded to ambush the leader of South Africa.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa and his delegation watched in stunned silence at footage that Trump believed supported his claims that Ramaphosa’s government was turning a blind eye to violence against white Afrikaners. When Trump identified images of crosses along a road as the marked graves of murdered white farmers, Ramaphosa said he hadn’t seen that before and would find out where it was filmed. The video also showed South African opposition leaders calling for the death of white farmers. Ramaphosa said he condemned those remarks and his political coalition had been built to sideline those calling for violence.
It was another tense confrontation between Trump and a U.S. ally, staged by the White House to air out those tensions in front of the world. Trump flipped through what he said were printed news articles about white farmers being killed. “Those people in many cases are being executed—they happen to be white and most of them happen to be farmers,” Trump said.
President Ramaphosa said that there is a lot of violent crime in the country but Black and white citizens are both targets. “There is criminality in our country. People who do get killed unfortunately through criminal activity are not only white people,” Ramaphosa told Trump.
