‘Look at Australia’: Trump ambushes South African president over ‘white genocide’

Washington: US President Donald Trump confronted his South African counterpart with unfounded claims of a genocide of Afrikaner farmers, and ranted extensively about the American media, in another extraordinary and tense Oval Office meeting with a foreign leader.

Trump dimmed the lights and played a video purporting to back up his assertions about the state-sanctioned mass murder of Afrikaners, the white ethnic minority that ruled South Africa during apartheid, as the country’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, was made to watch.

Trump twice cited Australia as evidence during the exchange, claiming both Australia and the United States were being flooded with white South African farmers. Dozens arrived in the US last week after the Trump administration fast-tracked their approval as refugees.

“You take a look at Australia, they’re being inundated and we’re being inundated with people that want to get out,” Trump said. “This is a very serious situation and … if we had a real press, this would be exposed.”

Trump held up printouts of articles about white farmers whom he said had been the victims of farm attacks, including robberies, land dispossession and murders.

Gang violence is rife in South Africa, although as Ramaphosa and other officials pointed out during the Oval Office meeting, most murder victims in South Africa are black.

President Donald Trump held up print-outs of stories about white farmers who were victims of crime, and handed them to the South African leader.Credit: Bloomberg

“You’re taking people’s land away from them,” Trump told Ramaphosa.

“We have not,” Ramaphosa responded.

Trump continued: “And those people in many cases are being executed. And they happen to be white, and most of them happen to be farmers. That’s a tough situation, I don’t know how you explain that. How do you explain that?

“We have thousands of people that want to come into our country. They’re also going to Australia, in a smaller number … They’re white farmers and they feel like they’re going to die.”

Later, the White House issued links to several media reports it said proved Trump was right about the situation in South Africa. It included two reports from Australia’s news.com.au from 2017 and 2018, and a television editorial by Sky News Australia’s Rita Panahi.

The tense exchange did not rise to a shouting match, but represented the most contentious Oval Office meeting since Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance ambushed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in late February.

The video shown in the Oval Office on Wednesday, Washington time, included clips from an incendiary speech by Julius Malema, leader of the communist Economic Freedom Fighters political party, insisting South Africans would occupy land without regard for the law.

“We don’t care, we can do whatever we want to do,” Malema said in the clip.

Ramaphosa told Trump that Malema belonged to a minority party that was allowed to exist under the South African Constitution and that his words did not constitute government policy.

At one point, Trump handed the article print-outs to Ramaphosa and said: “Those are all recent, those are all deaths.”

Ramaphosa said he appreciated that the US, as a South African partner, was raising genuine concerns about crime and would be happy to discuss them away from the cameras.

“We were taught by Nelson Mandela that whenever there are problems, people need to sit around a table and talk about it,” he said, referring to the former anti-apartheid activist who became South African president after decades in prison.

The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, who was born in South Africa, was present in the Oval Office for the confrontation.Credit: AP

The meeting, which was attended by South African-born billionaire and Trump adviser Elon Musk, was also notable for Trump’s targeting of an NBC journalist who asked about Qatar’s gift of a luxury Boeing 747-8 to the US government. The jet is to be fitted out as Air Force One and will then be transferred to Trump’s presidential library at the end of Trump’s term, in effect making it his own.

The US formally accepted the $US400 million ($621 million) plane on Wednesday, with chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell saying it had complied with “all federal rules and regulations”.

Immediately after the Oval Office saw the South Africa video, NBC journalist Peter Alexander began to ask about the Qatari plane.

Trump, who has been accused of corruption by soliciting and accepting the offer, interrupted and unleashed a torrent of abuse.

“What does this have to do with a Qatari jet? They’re giving the United States Air Force a jet, OK, and it’s a great thing,” he told Alexander.

“This is NBC trying to get off the subject of what you just saw. You are a real – you’re a terrible reporter. Number one, you don’t have what it takes to be a reporter, you’re not smart enough.

“You ought to go back to your studio at NBC because [Comcast chief executive] Brian Roberts and the people that run that place, they ought to be investigated. They are so terrible … and you’re a disgrace. No more questions from you. His name is Peter someone, he’s a terrible reporter.”

Trump constantly returned to the subject of the media after that, calling Alexander an “idiot” and a “jerk”, and asserting that if the US press wasn’t “fake”, they would give greater coverage to the plight of white South African farmers. “They won’t talk about it because they’re all guys like that idiot,” he said.

In 2018, Australia’s then home affairs minister Peter Dutton proposed granting special refugee visas to white South African farmers, noting there were already large numbers of expatriates living in Australia.

“They work hard, they integrate well into Australian society, they contribute to make us a better country and they’re the sorts of migrants that we want to bring into our country,” he said at the time.

However, it was reported in 2020 that no further South Africans had been accepted under the humanitarian program, despite a surge in applications.

According to rejection letters obtained by The Australian at the time, applicants were told crime and violence were widespread in South Africa but not systematic or discriminatory.

US President Donald Trump met South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office.Credit: AP

White South Africans made up about 7 per cent of South Africa’s 60 million-plus population as of 2022.

The latest South African crime figures, which are not broken down by race, show there were 6953 murders between October and December 2024, including 12 people killed in farm attacks, the BBC reports. Of the 12, one was a farmer, while five were farm dwellers and four were employees, who are likely to have been black.

Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for our weekly What in the World newsletter.