Trump repeats disputed claim that white farmers suffering ‘genocide’ in South Africa as first ‘refugees’ are flown in to US

Donald Trump on Monday claimed that the US media was refusing to write about a supposed “genocide” taking place in South Africa given that the alleged victims were white.

He made the comments in the Oval Office during a brief media availability centered around the signing of an executive order aimed at establishing price controls for prescription drugs. The US president’s remarks came as the first flight of white South African “refugees” were set to imminently disembark at Dulles airport.

“It’s a genocide that’s taking place that you people don’t want to write about,” said Trump. “It’s a terrible thing that’s taking place. And farmers are being killed. They happen to be white, but whether they’re white or Black makes no difference to me, but white farmers are being brutally killed, and their land is being confiscated in South Africa.”

Violence against white farmers is not particularly widespread even by the admission of organizations led by Afrikaaners dedicated to tracking farm attacks in South Africa, which suffers from a high rate of violent crime in general. White farmers own about 70 percent of commercial farmland in the country, despite making up a minority of the population. Fewer than 150 attacks involving farmers occurred during the entirety of 2023, according to the Afrikaaner political group AfriForum.

Numerous news reports and studies have found that despite a recent law being passed allowing the government to seize land in some cases without compensation, those land seizures have not actually taken place. AfriForum has vowed a legal fight in the country’s court system if that program were to begin, but even advocates for Afrikaaners have tempered their allegations and rhetoric beyond what the US president displayed on Monday.

Trump would insist on Monday that US media would cover the situation in South Africa more were the racial demographics reversed and a white majority was allegedly persecuting a Black minority.

“If it were the other way around, they’d talk about it. That would be the only story they’d talk about,” he said.

A spokesman for South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, said that the US was undermining South Africa’s sovereignty and perpetrating a false narrative, but said that the government would not hinder the departures of white South Africans who wished to leave for America.

“These people won’t be stopped from going, albeit under a false narrative,” Vincent Magwenya told NPR. “There’s no legal or any factual basis for the executive order sanctioning this action. None of the provisions of international law on the definition of refugees are applicable in this case.”

“Disturbingly, one has to admit that our sovereignty as a country is being grossly undermined and violated by the United States,” he added.

The Trump administration’s acceptance and even encouragement of migration from South Africa stands in stark contrast to the administration’s efforts to fast-track the asylum process and expel as many as one million undocumented immigrants during the president’s first year in office.

The president signed an executive order addressing the supposed “genocide” in February after the passage of that new law expanding the government’s power to seize land.

“The United States cannot support the government of South Africa’s commission of rights violations in its country or its undermining United States foreign policy, which poses national security threats to our Nation, our allies, our African partners, and our interests,” read the order, which also cited the South African goverment’s support for allegations of Israeli-led genocide in Gaza at the International Court of Justice.

Stephen Miller, the architect of that program, told reporters on Friday: “What’s happening in South Africa fits the textbook definition of why the refugee program was created. This is persecution based on a protected characteristic, in this case, race.”

Miller and Trump’s decision to lean in to a conspiracy theory about “white genocide” has been seen by many as a dogwhistle to the American extreme right, which under Trump’s first term in office coordinated a mass rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where racist and antisemitic rhetoric and groups were on full display. During the 2024 campaign, Trump himself was accused of spreading racist conspiracy theories after he accused Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, of eating stray household pets, including during a debate with Kamala Harris.