South Africa’s president couldn’t stop giggling about his encounter with Donald Trump.
Cyril Ramaphosa said he got flashbacks to his meeting with the U.S. president when he took the stage at the Sustainable Infrastructure Development Symposium in Cape Town on Tuesday.
“When I came in, I saw the room going a bit dark. They darkened the room. And for a moment, I wondered, ‘What is this? It’s happening to me again,’” he said with a chuckle as the crowd burst into laughter.
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Trump’s otherwise cordial meeting with Ramaphosa at the White House last week took a Zelensky-style turn when he played a video of what he claimed to be the burial grounds of white farmers allegedly killed by Black South Africans trying to take their land.
“At that moment, we were seated very nicely and I was beginning to get into a groove of interacting with this man, and I suddenly hear him say, ‘No, dim the lights,’” Ramaphosa told the Cape Town audience, who again broke out into laughter.
Trump used their meeting to confront Ramaphosa with unsubstantiated claims that South Africa’s Black-led government is anti-white and perpetrating a “white genocide” against local farmers while Elon Musk, the South African billionaire, stood on the sidelines of the Oval Office.
Fact-checkers have found, however, that the footage Trump played didn’t actually show the “burial sites” of “over a thousand” white farmers. Instead, the white crosses on display were temporarily erected as a memorial to a white farming couple shot dead on their premises in 2020.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt acknowledged that “the video shows crosses that represent the dead bodies of people who were racially persecuted by their government,” but glossed over questions that pointed out Trump claimed they were “burial sites.”
The interaction with Ramaphosa was reminiscent of a similarly tense meeting Trump had with Volodymyr Zelensky in February, when he dressed down the Ukrainian president in front of the cameras.
“I must say, a number of people have said, ‘This was an ambush. This was an ambush,’” Ramaphosa said Tuesday. “And I was bemused. I was saying, ‘What’s happening?’”
The Sunday Times, a prominent South African newspaper, blasted Trump for “blindsiding” Ramaphosa with claims of a “white genocide.”
During the Oval Office meeting, Trump also held up a printout of an American Thinker article as proof that white farmers are “being buried” in South Africa. But the image that accompanied the article—showing humanitarian workers lifting body bags—was, in fact, taken in Congo.
American Thinker managing editor Andrea Widburg, who authored the post Trump cited, told Reuters that the president “misidentified the image.” The White House did not respond to a Reuters request for comment.
