On Wednesday, President Donald Trump went on a racist tirade in front of South African President Cyril Ramaphosa and pushed the false narrative that a “white genocide” is underway in that nation. Now it is becoming clear that not only was Trump being racist, but he was also using faked documents to push his made-up story.
There is not a “white genocide” in South Africa, but that has been a narrative promoted for years by white supremacists as the nation attempts to deal with the decades-long fallout of the racist apartheid system of government. The cause of white supremacists has been amplified to the highest level of American government via Trump.
Trump’s decision to push this racist narrative echoes his actions during the presidential election in 2024, when he and now-Vice President JD Vance falsely accused Haitian migrants of stealing and eating domestic animals. Trump has spent his entire time as a political figure promoting racist lies to further his political fortunes.
During his meeting with Ramaphosa, Trump showed a video depicting a road in South Africa with crosses lined up at the roadside. Trump claimed that the video showed burial sites for white farmers who were killed.
“Now this is very bad. These are burial sites right here. Burial sites. Over 1,000. Of white farmers,” Trump said. “They’re all white farmers, the family of white farmers.”
This is a lie. The video shows a demonstration in 2020 where approximately 500 crosses were erected at a roadside in protest of an attack on one farm. The couple who owned the farm, Glen and Vida Rafferty, were killed. The crosses were about the tragic death of two people and not markers for “over 1,000” as Trump claimed.
The White House is so proud of their fake evidence that two separate YouTube videos featuring the demonstration have since been published.
Major Trump donor Elon Musk, who was in attendance at the meeting, has promoted the same videos on his X account. Musk has claimed he is stepping away from his role leading the administration’s DOGE team, but his presence at this key meeting undermines the claim that he isn’t still wielding enormous influence over Trump.
At another point in the meeting, Trump held up a series of website printouts and claimed that they were news articles and photos proving the “white genocide” mythology.
This is also false. One photo that Trump held up did not even take place in South Africa, but in fact was a photo depicting an event months ago from the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Trump claimed the clippings had been published in “the last few days” and depicted “death of people, death, death, death, horrible death, death.”
News24, a South African news service, said the clippings posted by Trump “do not match any known report by a reputable news outlet,” and noted that many of the stories he showed were based on social media postings.
Another printout that Trump brandished came from the right-wing blog American Thinker, which traffics in debunked conspiracy theories—like the racist Obama “birther” conspiracy that Trump promoted for years.
The verbal attack on Ramaphosa and all of South Africa reflects Trump’s core values and highlights once again his love of using faked materials to push his agenda.
Published with permission of Daily Kos
