It didn't take long for Donald Trump to go on the offensive during his meeting with the South African president. Trump tried to trap the South African president with the controversial "white genocide" theory promoted by the far right.
Tensions
President Donald Trump welcomed his South African counterpart, Cyril Ramaphosa, to the White House for a visit intended to ease tensions between the two countries.
Brutally
However, it seems that Trump has set a trap, which many observers have compared to the one he brutally set for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a few months earlier.
A video
Basically, Donald Trump ambushed the South African president. During the meeting in the Oval Office, the lights were turned off to project a video in which a member of a South African opposition party intones a chant calling for the death of Afrikaners, the term used to designate South Africa's white farmers. The footage also included unverified images purporting to show a mass grave where white farmers were allegedly buried.
The government's position
Ramaphosa vigorously refuted these accusations, pointing out that the chants and words in the video in no way represent the government's position, and recalling that criminal acts affect all South African communities, without distinction.
Verify their authenticity
The South African president then asserted that he had never seen the images of the mass grave in question, and asked his American counterpart for details of their origin, in particular the exact location where they had allegedly been filmed, in order to verify their authenticity. Donald Trump dismissed the question as unimportant.
A central role
It's worth recalling that Donald Trump has been targeted for several years by the lobbying efforts of AfriForum, a South African organization representing the interests of the Afrikaner minority. Although this group refrains from explicitly using the term "white genocide", its campaigns highlight accounts of persecution targeting white farmers. In fact, it was a video produced by AfriForum that Trump chose to broadcast in front of the South African president during their meeting.
Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk
This far-right rhetoric was also echoed by former Fox News star Tucker Carlson, who was instrumental in spreading the "white farmer genocide" theory in the USA. Elon Musk, too, played a role in this amplification. A native of South Africa and now an influential advisor to Donald Trump, Musk has taken up these allegations of "white genocide", notably through his artificial intelligence chatbot, Grok, which was criticized for spreading unfounded claims of allegedly targeted violence against white people in South Africa.