Trump’s attempt at Oval Office ‘gotcha’ moment backfired spectacularly - all because Ramaphosa kept his cool.

It looked for a moment as though the South African president had avoided a trap.

For weeks ahead of Cyril Ramaphosa’s White House visit, MAGA world had been promoting unsubstantiated claims about a hidden “white genocide” in the country. Donald Trump himself called it a “genocide,” as his administration officials greeted 59 white South Africans as “refugees” at the airport last Monday in D.C.

So, Ramaphosa came prepared. He brought with him two of the president’s favorite golfers and a giant book about golf. His introductory remarks were a tour de force of diplomacy, and the meeting was on track to avoid the doomed fate of Volodymyr Zelensky’s in February.

Then, a voice from the back of the room sparked chaos.

“What will it take for you to be convinced that there's no white genocide in South Africa?” a reporter with a South African accent shouted.

What followed was perhaps one of the most egregious demonstrations of whitesplaining in living memory.

Trump, armed with printouts of tabloid news articles and a montage of video clips, channeling a terminally online and conspiracy theory-loving uncle at an uncomfortable Thanksgiving dinner, launched into a meandering explanation of the current political situation in South Africa to its president.

“We have thousands of stories talking about it. We have documentaries, we have news stories,” Trump said, addressing his South African counterpart.

“Turn the lights down,” he added, as the South African delegation’s eyes widened with horror.

You can walk away from a difficult uncle when he tries to force you to watch YouTube videos about who really did 9/11. It’s harder when the difficult uncle is the most powerful man on the planet and the world’s press is filming you.

The lights of the Oval Office indeed dimmed, and Ramaphosa was forced to watch a series of out-of-context clips seemingly cobbled together by a Trump administration staffer to show the “real” truth about what was happening in his own country.

The video was not, as promised, a documentary. Instead, the clips consisted largely of opposition and extremist political figures making incendiary statements calling for the killing of Afrikaners.

In another dimension, a second-term president Joe Biden is sitting in Pretoria being forced to watch hours of Kathy Griffin’s stand up.

Ramaphosa kept his cool, even if he looked exasperated. He tried to interject, but was rebuffed by an entranced Trump, who also occasionally added commentary.

“Now, this is very bad. These are burial sites right here. Burial sites of over 1000 white farmers,” he said. The South African contingent looked stunned, which makes sense since rather than being grave sites of murdered farmers, the mounds with crosses were actually part of a protest to stop the violence.

As the video came to a close, an aide handed Trump a pile of printed-out articles from tabloid websites.

“Look, these are articles over the last few days,” he said, rifling through them.

“Death of people, death, death, death, horrible, death,” he continued.

“This family was wiped out.”

Trump has the most powerful intelligence agencies in the world at his command, and could surely have produced a detailed and damning report on the alleged white genocide in South Africa and presented it to the world’s press.

Instead, the print outs appeared more like the Facebook feed of someone in danger of ending up on an FBI watchlist.

The meeting continued to go off the rails as Trump opined on the non-existent genocide to a room full of South Africans — Black and white — who were telling him it was not a thing.

"This is sort of the opposite of apartheid," Trump said.

He even invited the opinions of the South African golfers Ramaphosa had brought with him, Ernie Els and Retief Goosen, who remained diplomatic.

Remarkably, and against all odds, Ramaphosa was able to salvage the meeting, calmly responding to the most egregious of the claims made by Trump and his videos.

“We have a multi-party democracy in South Africa that allows people to express themselves,” he said, explaining that none of the people in the video were members of his government. “Our government policy is completely, completely against what he was saying.”

Explaining that there is no evidence of white people being specifically targeted in South Africa, but that farmers of all races are victims of violent home invasions, would have taken a bit longer.

South African police data shows that 225 people were killed on farms in South Africa between April 2020 to March 2024 — but around half of those victims were current or former workers living on farms, who tend to be Black. Around 50 were farmers, who are usually white.

By the end, Trump had been hit with so many contradictory facts from the South African delegation that he looked as though he was almost beginning to question his printouts. Either that or he was bored and wanted to return to his other favorite activity: calling the press incompetent idiots.

Ramaphosa played a smart game. It wasn’t just the golf diplomacy, although that certainly helped. He brought a skilled diplomatic team who had been prepped for a showdown. Among them was the country’s Minister for Agriculture, John Steenhuisen, a white man and a member of a rival party, who told Trump that South Africa had a rural crime problem, not a white genocide problem. Ramaphosa repeatedly invoked Nelson Mandela and South Africa’s history of racial peacemaking since apartheid.

By the end, the mood had lightened. Ramaphosa even had the poise to crack a joke.

“I am sorry I don't have a plane to give you,” he said when Trump was in the middle of a rant about the media after being questioned on his new Qatari jet.

If there was one saving grace from the blow up, it was that the biggest South African agitator in the room was kept from making things even worse.

"Elon is from South Africa," Trump said, referring to Elon Musk, who stood just to the side of the president in the Oval Office.

"I don't want to get Elon involved," Trump said. "I don't want to talk to him about that. I don't think it's fair to him."

Now Trump Tells President He’d Like a Plane From South Africa

Donald Trump told South Africa’s president that he would take an aircraft from his country as a gift if one was offered.

The exchange was a lighter moment in a tense White House meeting between Trump and South African leader Cyril Ramaphosa.

But it wasn’t altogether clear that the U.S. president was joking.

The quip came as the Pentagon announced it had formally accepted a 747 jetliner as a gift from the government of Qatar.

During an often tense Oval Office meeting where Trump claimed that white South African farmers were facing genocide by black South Africans, Ramaphosa sought to defuse tensions by joking: “I’m sorry I don’t have a plane to give you.”

“I wish you did,” Trump replied.

“If your country offered the United States Air Force a plane, I would take it.”

The Oval Office meeting was meant to be a chance for South Africa to reset its relationship with the US.

But partway through, Trump began clashing with an NBC reporter who asked about the Pentagon formally accepting the controversial Qatari jet that was gifted to the US earlier this month.

“What are you talking about? You know, you ought to get out of here,” Trump responded, insisting that the plane was gifted to the US Air Force.

“Not to me - the Air Force,” a visibly annoyed Trump said, “so they could help us out because we need an Air Force One until (two others by Boeing) are built.”

“I’m sorry I don’t have a plane to give you,” Ramaphosa interjected.

If only he did, Trump replied.

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‘White people are fleeing’: How Trump opened America’s borders to South African refugees

Donald Trump’s confrontation with Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office was a long time coming.

The two governments have been exchanging barbs about an alleged genocide of white South Africans for months.

It is a row that has its roots in genuine lawlessness, a disillusion with Nelson Mandela’s promised rainbow nation, and post apartheid racial tensions that cannot be simply wished away.

But it is also a story of confused narratives, fringe black and white extremist groups, and the outsize influence of Elon Musk in the White House. Perhaps above all, it is about concepts being lost in translation between South Africa and America.

The confrontation began to spiral earlier this month, when what were apparently the first refugees to be allowed into the United States since Donald Trump issued a blanket ban landed at Dulles Airport near Washington, DC.

They were not from Ukraine, Afghanistan, Sudan or any of the world’s other active war zones. They were from South Africa. And they were all white Afrikaners.

Race has little to do with refugee status. But the incident has thrust into the spotlight not only the increasingly bitter relationship between Pretoria and Washington, but also Donald Trump’s own contentious focus on what has been called “white victimhood”.

In America, the news has been predictably divisive. The White House trumpeted the arrival of the 59 as a triumph, claiming they were victims of “racial discrimination”, and hinted that they were escaping a “genocide”. An under-secretary of state was dispatched to welcome them.

But the Episcopal Church, which has long been given US government grants to resettle refugees in America, responded by saying it would refuse to do so in this case, citing its “steadfast commitment to racial justice and reconciliation”.

Bishop Sean Rowe said it was “painful to watch one group of refugees, selected in a highly unusual manner, receive preferential treatment over many others who have been waiting in refugee camps or dangerous conditions for years”.

In South Africa, the news was met with a mixture of outrage, glee and bemusement.

Chrispin Phiri, a foreign ministry spokesman, insisted that “these are not refugees” yet added: “We are not going to stand in their way.”

Kallie Kriel, the CEO of AfriForum, an influential Afrikaner pressure group which has previously called for white people to stay in South Africa, said the flight was a “direct result of the [African National Congress] ANC-led government’s targeting of Afrikaners through discriminatory racial legislation”.

Other South Africans – including Afrikaners – have rolled their eyes at the entire episode.

“This is about Trump’s America. It really isn’t about us,” said Max du Preez, a prominent Afrikaner journalist. “There’s an awful lot wrong in South Africa, but the persecution of white Afrikaners is not one of them.”

The fury of the American Episcopalians is rooted in concern at a double standard – one it clearly believes is rooted in race.

In the fiscal year from October 2023 to September 2024, America resettled 100,034 refugees, the highest number admitted in a single year since 1994. Yet on his first day in office, Donald Trump signed an executive order banning refugees entry “until such time as the further entry into the United States of refugees aligns with the interests of the United States”. That includes applicants from war zones.

A little over two weeks later, he signed another, ordering the government to promote and prioritise “the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation”.

The order, which also froze all aid and other funding to South Africa and accused its government of supporting Hamas and Iran, grants a small group of white people the only exception to an otherwise global ban on refugees.

By then, Washington’s relationship with South Africa had been deteriorating for some time. In December 2023, the ANC-led government in Pretoria brought a case of genocide against Israel at the International Court of Justice in the Hague.

But the immediate trigger was a new South African law allowing the state to seize land without compensation, provided it was in the “public interest”.

The bill, signed into law by South African president Cyril Ramaphosa in January, allows for expropriation without compensation only when it is “just and equitable and in the public interest” – such as when the property is unused.

It does not mention race. But land ownership is a hugely contentious issue in South Africa, where three-quarters of farmland is owned by white people, who make up just 7 per cent of the population.

Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, announced he would snub a G20 meeting in Johannesburg the following month, stating: “South Africa is doing very bad things. Expropriating private property.”

Shortly afterwards Rubio expelled Ebrahim Rasool, South Africa’s ambassador to Washington, on the grounds of being “a race-baiting politician who hates America.”

Rasool had said that the Maga movement is a response to a “supremacist instinct” and demographic trends that suggest whites will become a minority in the United States for the first time by the mid 2040s.

Meanwhile Elon Musk, Trump’s South-African born “first buddy”, accused his homeland of “racist ownership laws” which equate to “genocide” against white farmers.

Trump repeated that wording earlier this month, saying “white farmers” were being targeted specifically. “It’s a genocide that’s taking place... and farmers are being killed. They happen to be white. But whether they’re white or black makes no difference to me. But white farmers are being brutally killed and their land is being confiscated in South Africa,” he said.

Credit: Reuters

In the Oval office today, he showed Ramaphosa what he claimed were “burial sites right here, over a thousand of white farmers”.

If Afrikaner nationalists have been making the rounds of Maga-affiliated media in recent weeks, describing a South Africa on the brink of collapse and a community facing deep levels of persecution, the South African government certainly sees Musk as the driving force behind Donald Trump’s policy making.

When Trump first signed the executive order, for example, Ramaphosa reached out to Elon Musk’s father Errol, who still lives in South Africa, to see if he could arrange a phone call with the tycoon. Errol Musk later told The Telegraph the two spoke for several minutes.

Ramaphosa himself has rejected the allegations of “genocide” levelled by the US administration even before he got to DC.

“A refugee is someone who has to leave their country out of fear of political persecution, religious persecution, or economic persecution,” the South African leader said of those arriving in the US after the refugee flight. “And they don’t fit that bill.”

White genocide

The notion of “white genocide” has gained traction in certain sections of the white, and particularly rural, Afrikaner community over the past ten years.

“It has emerged on the back of very, violent crimes of murder, torture and other things that have happened to the Afrikaner community, and very specifically to rural Afrikaner farmers,” says Marius Oosthuizen, a Pretoria-based consultant.

“There’s a faction of the Afrikaners who feel very threatened, very embattled, both because of insecurity and crime and the threat of land expropriation.”

There is plenty of debate about whether that is justified.

Figures collated by South African police show that in 2024, 44 murders were recorded on farms and smaller plots of agricultural land. While the country does not release crime statistics broken down by race, eight of those killed were farmers.

Du Preez points out that everyone in South Africa (where around 20,000 murders are committed annually) suffers from insecurity, and that living in black or coloured townships is statistically vastly more dangerous than being a white farmer, however.

The farm murders are a genuine problem, he says, but are a matter of common criminality. “Study after study failed to find any kind of political motivation,” he says. There is no comparison to Robert Mugabe’s evictions of white farmers from Zimbabwe in the 2000s, either in intent, scale, or effect, he points out.

There are clear tensions nonetheless, and there has long been frustration in South Africa over the sluggish pace of land reform in the decades since the end of apartheid. While redistribution of land ownership has always been part of the post-apartheid project, it has always previously involved compensating those who give up their property.

But AfriForm, a Right-wing pressure group, explicitly links the new property law to the refugees who landed in Dulles, saying it “permits expropriation without compensation, and also places Afrikaners and other landowners in the government’s crossfire”.

No land is understood to have yet been seized under the act. Defenders of the legislation say it is less likely to be used against farmers than for taking control of derelict and abandoned buildings and sites in city centres.

But the law passed earlier this year does mirror the populist rhetoric of Julius Malema, a former ANC firebrand who now leads a populist rival to the ANC called the Economic Freedom Fighters. He has long demanded expropriation without compensation.

Trump ambushed Ramaphosa with a video of Malema singing “kill the Boer” calling for occupation of farms during the Oval office meeting.

Ramaphosa, quite reasonably, pointed out that this is “not government policy”, that Malema leads a fringe opposition party, and condemned the rhetoric.

And he brought in John Steenhuisen, his white agriculture minister, who told Trump that most farmers want to stay in South Africa and that what the country really needed was help in delivering economic growth that would shut the door on extremists like Malema.

That’s all fair enough. But some still feel that the spirit, if not the letter, of the new law has a racial undertone.

“When they did this, they did it through a constitutional review process, and so the ANC will argue that they are doing it within the ambit of the law, that it’s not aimed at white South Africans. But if you look at the fundamentals, it’s really about the ability of government to expropriate white-owned land,” says Dr Oosthuizen.

Combine that with Malema’s salty rhetoric, including adoption of a song with the line “kill the Boer,” and many rural Afrikaners feel genuinely threatened, he adds.

So while the 59 who arrived in Dulles airport were the first to take advantage of the refugee exemption, more may be on the way.

In March, the South African Chamber of Commerce in the United States said it had handed the US embassy in Pretoria the details of nearly 70,000 South Africans who contacted it for more information about the refugee scheme. Demand was huge, it reported

“It just spread like wildfire. I had 7,500 emails in my mailbox. Over 2500 texts, WhatsApps and messages. Basically our mail server crashed,” Neil Diamond, the head of the chamber, told television channel Newzroom Afrika at the time.

How many will really leave?

Those who really believe in “white genocide”, want to leave the country or establish a separate state “are the crazies of our society,” says Du Preez. “They’re tiny even among conservative Afrikaners,” said.

There is a reason Afrikaners named themselves after the continent, he points out. They regard themselves as indigenous, and on the whole intend to stay.

More important than the number of refugees, say some, is the message they send.

Stephen Grootes, a South African radio host, argues in the liberal newspaper Daily Maverick, that Trump simply “needs to prove to his own constituency that white people are ‘victims’.”

Oosthuizen agrees. The refugee flights, he suggests, may play to a domestic political audience in America: “In America’s own political discourse there is a racial element – black lives matter, family values, and the battle for preservation of white America. That definitely motivates some of the Republican base.”