President Trump scolds South Africa over ‘bad situation’ surrounding white farmer murders, confiscation laws

President Donald Trump used a video montage of clips to press U.S. claims of murder and confiscation targeting white farmers in South Africa as he hosted the African country’s president.

The U.S. president used an Oval Office meeting packed with administration figures and members of the press to make his case, as he did previously with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and on the subject of deportations of illegal immigrant gang members.

Despite Trump only mentioning genocide once in relation to U.S. policy of taking in victims of genocide from many countries, the legacy media is widely reporting Trump accused South Africa of “genocide” during the meeting. 

However, all other uses of the word genocide came from reporters or South African officials, who each rushed to try to debunk claims of anti-white violence. 

The video clips shown in the Oval Office included scenes of nearly 3,000 crosses representing white farmers killed in South Africa.  

It also included prominent black African politicians using an old campaign song calling for the killing of white farmers in South Africa, a song known as “Kill the Boer.” White farmers historically have been called boers.  

Some of the clips alluded to using machine guns making the white farmers run.  

Despite claims by South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa that no responsible politician in the country is in favor of killing white people, the U.K.’s Daily Mail notes that the most prominent of the race-baiting black South African Marxists using the “Kill the Boer” chant is an election away from becoming vice president. 

That man, Julius Sello Malema, of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) party, also favors the confiscation of land from white farmers, which would then be distributed to blacks, reported the Daily Mail.  

The EFF is the fourth largest party in South Africa, which is 81% black and 7% white, according to the 2022 census.  

During the press availability in the Oval Office, South Africa’s minister of agriculture said that the reason why he joined the government after years of opposition to Ramaphosa is to prevent Malema from forming a government. 

“Now the reason that my party the Democratic Alliance, which has been an opposition party over 30 years, chose to join hands with Mr. Ramaphosa’s party was precisely to keep those people out of power,” he said.  

When confronted with the law that allows the government to confiscate land without payment, the South African president compared it to eminent domain laws in the U.S. that allow condemnation of land by the government for the public good.  

But South Africa’s latest confiscatory law goes much further than eminent domain and aligns more closely with the EFF’s platform.

In fact, in January, Ramaphosa approved a law that allows the confiscation of land by the state when the state decides it is “just and equitable and in the public interest” [emphasis added].  

In February, Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio called out South Africa’s new land law, calling it a combination of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and climate change alarms.  

“I will NOT attend the G20 summit in Johannesburg. South Africa is doing very bad things,” Rubio posted to X. “Expropriating private property. Using G20 to promote ‘solidarity, equality, & sustainability.’ In other words: DEI and climate change. My job is to advance America’s national interests, not waste taxpayer money or coddle anti-Americanism.”  

Ramaphosa also considered the political calls for violence a matter of free speech.  

“We have a multi-party democracy in South Africa that allows people to express themselves, political parties adhere to various policies,” he said in defending the use of the dangerous rhetoric. 

But just because South Africa’s law allows political parties to call for violence doesn’t mean it’s right, answered Trump.  

Trump complained, “People kill them [the Boer farmers] and then take their land and nothing happens to them.”  

He said the killings were “a rough thing to explain away.” 

When asked what South Africa might do to improve relations with the U.S., Trump said the killing needs to stop.  

“All we know is we’re being inundated with people, with white farmers from South Africa, and it’s a big problem,” he told the reporter. “Marco Rubio was telling me he’s never seen anything like it. The numbers of people that want to leave South Africa because they feel they’re going to be dead very soon.”  

Trump dismissed efforts by South Africans to minimize the problem.  

Nearly 20% of white South Africans had fled the country since 1994, when Ramaphosa’s party first took over. That’s over 800,000 people in a current population of 4 million whites. 

Nearly 70,000 white South Africans recently indicated a desire to seek asylum in the U.S.  

“It’s got to be resolved. It should be resolved,” the U.S. president said. “I mean, it’s a little bit bad when you see a stadium with 100,000 people in it [chanting ‘Kill the Boer’], because that means it’s more than just a little movement. It’s a pretty big movement in South Africa.” 

The South African government undertook the trip to persuade Trump to attend the G20 summit hosted by their government in November. Without the U.S. participation the conference will be considered a failure. 

They’re also feeling the pinch because cancellation of USAID funding by the Trump administration will cause a $430 million deficit for the South African government this year alone.   

And even before the recent confiscation laws and accusations of organized murder against whites, U.S.-South African relations were headed for hard times. 

While South Africa claims to be non-aligned, the Council on Foreign Relations reports that the African country favors Palestine over Israel and Iran, Russia, and China over the U.S., irking Trump and Rubio, especially because the U.S. was the largest foreign aid donor.