During a contentious Oval office meeting on Wednesday, President Donald Trump faced the South African President Cyril Ramaphosa with images and video clips that, according to him, show a continuous “genocide” against white farmers in the country.
But the images that the president pointed out in the attenuated White House room, showing a row of crosses, was not what Trump made him.
“These are the – these are burial sites here,” Trump said about the footage.
“Each of those white things you see is a cross. And there are approximately thousands of them. All are white farmers, the family of white farmers … All those people are killed,” Trump added.
President Donald Trump meets with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa at the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, on May 21, 2025.
Jim Watson/AFP through Getty Images
Actually, the video shows a protest that took place on September 5, 2020, near Normandien, South Africa. The protest was called by the murder reported by two farmers at home in the area days before, according to Newcastle’s local advertiser.
According to the exit, the volunteers placed the crosses along a section of the protest route.
The protest was also described in a report at that time of the Institute of Razing Relations of South Africa, which produced its own video that shows the protest.
Hermann Pretorous, a spokeswoman for the institute, told ABC News: “Those crosses are not tombs, but they are crosses that commemorate the victims of agricultural murder.”
“They were temporarily shown as part of a processional protest after Glenn’s murders and Rafferty life, who were killed on their farm in Normandien in Kwazulu-Natal. The crosses were later removed,” Pretorous said.
Elon Musk attends a meeting between President Donald Trump and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa at the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, on May 21, 2025.
Jim Watson/AFP through Getty Images
Google Street View images taken in May 2023 also show that, until that moment, the crosses were no longer standing.
In another part of the video, there is a person in a red beret that repeatedly sings “kills the Boer, kills the farmer” and talks about taking land without compensation.
The person is Julius Malema, who founded the fighters of economic freedom of the small but radical party after being expelled from the African National Congress, of which Ramaphosa is a member in 2013.
The person in the video that appears in the yellow shirt is the former South African president Jacob Zuma, who is now the leader of the opposition party of Umkhonto Wesizwe (MK).
A video is reproduced when South African President Cyril Ramaphosa meets President Donald Trump at the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, on May 21, 2025.
Jim Watson/AFP through Getty Images
After Trump played the video, Ramaphosa said the speeches seen in Trump’s video did not represent his government’s policies. The Minister of Opposition Agriculture of South Africa also said that many parties had worked to keep extremists outside the government.
During the meeting, Trump also showed an impression of a blog post with an image of the Democratic Republic of the Congo; Trump suggested that the image had been taken in South Africa.
Elon Musk, a native of South Africa and Trump’s main advisor, was present for Ramaphosa’s visit to the White House on Wednesday. He has also previously expressed Trump’s accusations that White South Africans flee from the country due to “violence and racist laws.”
Ramaphosa, the main political parties in South Africa and a South African judge, however, have denied the existence of a white genocide in the country.
President Donald Trump shows new articles while gathering with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa at the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, on May 21, 2025.
Somodevilla/Getty chip
In February 2025, a South African court ruled that the white genocide statements were unfounded, calling them “non -real” and “clearly imagined.”
While the court has noticed claims of a white genocide, it is true that there is a problem with which some farmers are killed in South Africa.
Some of the murders are horrible, and the general murder rate in South Africa is high, with 45 murders per 100,000 people, according to the data collected in 2023, but there are no indications that the murders are driven by the race.
During the Oval office meeting with Trump, Ramaphosa said: “There is criminality in our country. People who are killed, unfortunately, through criminal activities are not only white, most of them are black people.”
The White House issued a statement after the meeting entitled “President Trump is right about what is happening in South Africa”, doubling the unfounded statements of the administration of violence promoted by the race that occur in the nation.
The statement has a list of press clippings that say they support their position, pointing to Fox News, Breitbart and the BBC. Many of the cuts in the statement refer to individual acts or threats of violence.
Chris Looft, Kerem Inal, Lena Camilletti and Gaby Vinick of ABC News contributed to this report.
