Trump, Ramaphosa Meeting 'Ambush' Over Afrikaner Genocide Claims

Patrick Gaspard, US Ambassador to South Africa during the Obama Administration, reacts to the oval office meeting between President Trump and South African President Ramaphosa and claims by Trump that white Afrikaners are facing genocide, as well as Elon Musk's role in the increasingly tense relationship.

President Cyril Ramaphosa came to the White House looking to persuade President Donald Trump to stop floating the conspiracy theory that there’s a genocide against White people in South Africa.  Instead, the man who’d helped negotiate the end of apartheid walked into a trap

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Ramaphosa had sought the meeting with Trump in a bid to build a relationship with the president and boost trade. He brought two White South African professional golfers and the country’s White agriculture minister plus a book on the sport to present to the US leader. “If there was Afrikaner farmer genocide I can bet you these three gentlemen would not be here,” he said.

That was the US president’s cue.

Trump asked that the lights be dimmed and teed up a video that purported to back up his claims that White farmers are being targeted. Among its images was leftist South African opposition leader Julius Malema chanting “kill the Boer,” which means farmer in Afrikaans.

“Each one of those white things you see is a cross, and there’s approximately a thousand of them,” Trump said, as the video showed a field of white crosses representing White farmer deaths. “You’re taking people’s land away from them and those people in many cases are being executed.”

It confirmed the fears of some of his advisers, who had warned he might be heading into an Oval Office ambush similar to the one what Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy experienced earlier this year when Trump berated him over his handling of Russia’s invasion.

It was “definitely an ambush, because the program format was changed at the last minute,” South African Presidency spokesman Vincent Magwenya said in an interview after the Oval Office meeting. “You could see, standing in inside the oval office, that this was a well-planned, well-orchestrated operation.”

“That video and those articles had no credibility whatsoever,” he added. “But from here onwards, we can now deal with substantive issues, because they’ve made the point, they will feel good they’ve made the point, and we can now focus on what needs to be done to take the relationship forward.”

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