News24 | FACT CHECK | Donald Trump presented Cyril Ramaphosa with a collection of misinformation

• US President Donald Trump confronted SA President Cyril Ramaphosa with a portfolio of misleading claims during their Oval Office meeting on Wednesday.
• He played a video framing minority party leader Julius Malema as a representative of government policy and misrepresented a farm protest as footage of mass graves for white farmers.
• He also presented a pile of press clippings, including several articles from partisan American blogs purporting to show “horrible death” of white farmers, some of which didn’t.

During an extraordinary meeting at the White House on Wednesday, US President Donald Trump presented South African President Cyril Ramaphosa with a collection of press clippings, video footage, and commentary alleging that South Africa’s white farmers were being systematically targeted for murder and land confiscation.

Central to Trump’s presentation were clippings from various obscure websites, a debunked video montage of opposition politician Julius Malema, and an aerial video he described as evidence of mass graves of white farmers.

A review of the video and his press clippings reveals misinformation designed to fit a narrative of white farm killings and government-sanctioned land takeovers.

The video that took Ramaphosa by surprise

The first part of the video presented to Ramaphosa in the Oval Office ambush was old news and likely no surprise to the South African president. He chose not to watch it, and instead smiled as the voice of Julius Malema played out in the office.

It consisted of video clips Trump had recently circulated on his Truth Social and X accounts, in which he claimed that land confiscation and genocide were taking place in South Africa.

The compilation video featured archival footage of Malema, edited in a way that may lead uninformed viewers to believe he holds executive power or speaks for the government.

It also included a 2012 clip of former president Jacob Zuma singing a struggle-era song that contained the phrase “Kill the Boer.”

As News24 has previously detailed, and delegation members in the room with Trump were quick to highlight, neither Malema nor Zuma currently holds executive office in South Africa, and the compilation video provides no evidence of official government policy. Ramaphosa made this point directly to Trump in the Oval Office.

However, it was footage that followed these clips, showing white wooden crosses lining a rural highway, that seemed to surprise Ramaphosa who confessed he had not previously seen the video.

Trump commentated over the footage, describing it as burial sites of white farmers.

“Now this is very bad. These are burial sites right here. Burial sites. Over 1 000. Of white farmers,” he said. “They’re all white farmers, the family of white farmers.”

This is incorrect and misleading. The footage was of a farm attack protest held in September 2020 near Newcastle, KwaZulu-Natal. The demonstration was organised by local farming communities following the killing of Glen and Vida Rafferty, a couple murdered on their farm the previous month.

The case was quickly resolved by police but served as motivation for a peaceful protest during which approximately 500 symbolic crosses were erected along the road — not the “over a thousand” that Trump claimed.

The protest and memorial were temporary and intended to draw attention to farm-related crime in the region. No bodies were interred at the site, and there was no direct correlation between these crosses and a verified number of farm murders in South Africa.

An article published on the website of the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) highlights that this was not a memorial for white farmers only, as Trump repeatedly asserted. Instead, according to the IRR, this was a multi-racial protest supported by people from across the region.

Trump further claimed that the cars “lined up to pay love on a Sunday morning… And those cars aren’t driving, they’re stopped there to pay respects to their family member who was killed.” This is again misleading — given it was a protest that, according to the IRR, occurred on a Saturday.

Despite some of the original footage dating back to 2020, it has recently seen a resurgence online as some have used it to support a narrative of attacks specifically targeting white farmers in South Africa.

Misleading newspaper clippings

Trump also presented printed online press clippings, including articles about farm attacks and other matters relating to South Africa and Africa, many of which originated from online posts, partisan blogs, or unverifiable sources.

The story on the top of the pile carried the headline: “Brutal farm attack in South Africa: Elderly man beaten, hacked with machete, and left for dead.” While paging past the first article, Trump says: “Death of people, death, death, horrible death.” The article shown during this remark describes an attack in which the victims survived.

The headline and format presented do not match any known report by a reputable news outlet. The wording instead appears to be sourced from a widely circulated social media post, not an original news report. Only one news outlet that News24 could identify, the community newspaper the Lowvelder, appears to have covered the story.

Other articles Trump paged past include some of verified farm attacks and murders, including a TimesLIVE report of the murder of a Limpopo farmer and sensationalised reports from foreign outlets, including the Daily Mail and New York Post.

One article that Trump held up and said “horrible death” is lifted from conservative US blog American Thinker. It is titled “Black terrorists talk ‘seizing the means of production’ in South Africa”, and provides little evidence to support its claims which are based entirely on an X post by user Twatterbaas.

At one stage, Trump holds up another American Thinker blog post titled “Let’s talk about Africa, which is where tribalism takes you”. Trump says to the audience that the article is about “white South African farmers being burned”. The actual article clearly references women in the Democratic Republic of the Congo being the victims of this crime.

Farm attack statistics

Trump’s presentation attempted to link the video and newspaper to broader claims of systemic attacks on white farmers in South Africa. Though both Ramaphosa and members of his delegation admitted to a broader issue of crime, there is no evidence to support that farm attacks in South Africa constitute a racially targeted or government-sanctioned campaign.

Official data does not support the suggestion of a targeted campaign or genocide. Yearly farm murder totals have ranged between 49 and 63 since 2020, depending on the source, with the majority of attacks attributed to motives such as robbery.

Academic researchers and independent monitoring groups have found no evidence that white farmers are being systematically “executed,” nor that farm murders are increasing at a rate beyond general violent crime trends. And Trump’s claims continue to rely on selectively edited material and unverified sources, none of which substantiate allegations of state-sponsored violence or land seizures in South Africa.

*At News24, facts matter. This article was produced by the News24 Fact Check Desk and supported by Truth First. If there is something you’d like us to check out, debunk or uncover, send an email to our desk at debunk@news24.com.