In his meeting with President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa on Wednesday, President Trump claimed white South African farmers were victims of genocide and, to support that assertion, he held up an image that he said was from South Africa and which he claimed showed some of those victims being buried. The Reuters news agency said Friday that the photos were actually of the conflict in eastern Congo. That was not the only false claim he made.
Here’s a look at some of the most glaring misinformation from the contentious meeting.
A Misrepresented Image
During the encounter, Mr. Trump presented a stack of articles and blog posts as evidence of the persecution of white farmers in South Africa. He shuffled through them as Mr. Ramaphosa squinted at the pages, trying to see what they said. One of the images Mr. Trump held up showed medical workers in white protective clothing lifting body bags.
“Look, here’s burial sites all over the place,” Mr. Trump said, grasping up a copy of the blog post. “These are white farmers that are being buried.”
The Reuters News agency said on Friday that the image was taken from its recent exclusive video report documenting the aftermath of fighting between Congolese troops and fighters from the M23 rebel group in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. The image was later published on the website of American Thinker, a conservative online magazine, with an article that captioned it only as a “YouTube screen grab.”
The White House did not respond to a query from Reuters about the image.
A Controversial Chant
Mr. Trump had aides dim the lights in the Oval Office and showed a video during the meeting that featured the booming voice of a rabble-rousing South African opposition politician known for controversial comments, Julius Malema.
Along with a montage collected from years of interviews, the video also showed Mr. Malema, who is Black, shouting an apartheid-era chant — “Kill the Boer!” “Kill the farmer!” — at a packed stadium rally for his party, the Economic Freedom Fighters, adding a sound meant to imitate a gun.
Mr. Malema has used the song repeatedly to rile up his audiences and roil his political enemies. The Boers in the chant refer to Afrikaners, the descendants of the European settlers, mostly Dutch, German and French, who arrived in South Africa during colonialism. The chant was born at a time when Black South Africans were fighting the country’s violent, racist apartheid government. After the end of apartheid in 1994, the African National Congress transitioned from a liberation movement to South Africa’s governing party, and it distanced itself from the song.
Mr. Malema, however, has held on to it as part of his arsenal of incendiary comments to portray himself and his party as radical revolutionaries.
AfriForum, a group that represents the interests of Afrikaners, took Mr. Malema to court in 2011 and 2022 seeking to block him from singing the song. Initially, a judge ruled that the song was hate speech, but Mr. Malema continued.
Then in 2022, a judge ruled that AfriForum had “failed to show that the lyrics in the songs could reasonably be construed to demonstrate a clear intention to harm or incite to harm and propagate hatred.”
Groups that claim Afrikaners are the victims of violent persecution in South Africa have seized on Mr. Malema’s comments and songs, even as his own party’s popularity dims.
In South Africa, the English-language outlet News 24 traced the video Mr. Trump played to a social media account known for spreading misinformation. The investigative report found that Elon Musk had reposted the same video at least twice on X, the social media platform he owns.
A Misconstrued Memorial
In the video Mr. Trump played, an aerial shot shows dozens of cars driving slowly on a rural road lined on both sides with white crosses.
Mr. Trump described the convoy of cars as people coming to pay respects to their dead loved ones. “It’s a terrible sight,” Mr. Trump said. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Those people were all killed.”
“Have they told you where that is, Mr. President?” Mr. Ramaphosa asks, exchanging bewildered looks with other members of the South African delegation. “I’d like to know where that is because this I’ve never seen.”
“I mean, it’s in South Africa,” Mr. Trump responded.
A New York Times analysis found that the footage showed a memorial procession for a white couple who had been killed on their farm that was held on Sept. 5, 2020, near the town of Newcastle, in South Africa’s eastern KwaZulu-Natal province. And the white crosses were installed as symbols and removed after the procession. They are frequently used by demonstrators who are often, but not always, farmers protesting what they say is police inaction around murders and crime in rural areas.
These protests have, at times, been hijacked by groups peddling the idea that white farmers are the victims of targeted killings that they describe as a “white genocide” in South Africa.
Despite statistics debunking this myth, the idea has taken root among conspiratorial far right groups on the internet. It has also made its way to the White House, where it has shaped foreign policy and upended refugee norms after Mr. Trump offered expedited asylum to white Afrikaners.
Lynsey Chutel is a Times reporter based in London who covers breaking news in Africa, the Middle East and Europe.
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