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Trump’s Oval Office drama: Unpacking the misleading claims about South Africa’s 'white genocide'

Trump’s Oval Office drama: Unpacking the misleading claims about South Africa’s 'white genocide'
Rebecca Davis
By Rebecca Davis
22 May 2025
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US President Donald Trump dramatically ambushed President Cyril Ramaphosa with a multimedia presentation in the Oval Office encompassing Julius Malema, the MK party and farm murders. But how much of it was real?

When US President Donald Trump sat down with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, the tone of the engagement was initially cordial — until a journalist asked what Trump would need to see to be persuaded that “white genocide” in South Africa was not real.

Ignoring Ramaphosa’s response — that if Trump simply listened to the stories of his delegation over lunch, he would understand the reality — Trump called for the lights of the Oval Office to be dimmed and for a video to be played in what was clearly a pre-planned manoeuvre. 

The woman responsible for plugging a laptop into the Oval Office TV was a White House aide called Natalie Harp.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nh25AmXWxpU

Who is Natalie Harp, the woman who cued up Trump’s video?


Harp first came to widespread public attention in November 2024, when the New York Times published an article revealing the fact that her nickname is “the human printer” because she follows Trump around with a portable printer with a battery pack so that he can look at hard copies of reports, as is his preference.

Harp is a former anchor on a right-wing cable news network. Crucially, she is not known as a reliable fact checker.

“When people seeking influence with Mr Trump want to turn him against their rivals, they send damaging clips to Ms Harp, knowing she will pass them along, unvetted,” wrote the New York Times. 

“Unvetted” is the critical word here.

What did the video show?


The 4.35-minute video showed the following:

  • EFF leader Julius Malema telling Parliament that he would “occupy land”.

  • Malema telling a rally: “At some point a revolution demands there must be killing.”

  • Malema singing “Kill the Boer” at a rally (four different clips).

  • Malema saying: “We are cutting the throat of whiteness.”

  • Malema telling a TV interviewer: “We have not called for the killing of white people — at least for now. We cannot guarantee the future.”

  • Former president Jacob Zuma singing “Kill the Boer” at a rally.

  • Malema telling Parliament: “We will expropriate their land without compensation whether they like it or not.”

  • An aerial shot of a farm murder protest featuring white crosses, accompanied by a tweet claiming: “Each cross represents a white farmer who was murdered in South Africa.”


The clip of a helicopter flying above the farm murder protest occupied almost a minute on its own.

The video was later posted by the White House on its X account with the words: “Proof of Persecution in South Africa”.

How much of this is real?


All the clips featuring Julius Malema appear to be legitimate and undoctored, and the rhetoric shown is very much on brand for the EFF leader. 

A number of these clips have circulated widely before. Malema’s threat to “cut the throat of whiteness” was made in 2018 in reference to the EFF’s plan to remove then-mayor of Nelson Mandela Bay Athol Trollip, at that point a DA leader.

The comment caused widespread outrage at the time, with the DA reporting Malema to the Equality Court. Erstwhile EFF spokesperson Mbuyiseni Ndlozi said at the time that the statement was a metaphor in reference to “unapologetically and unsympathetically” removing Trollip.

The interview in which Malema said that he was not calling for the killing of white people “for now” was given to Turkish state TV channel TRT World shortly after, also in 2018.

It, too, elicited outrage.

Trump had clearly been misinformed about Malema’s identity, however, since he wrongly referred to him as a “government official” — and brushed off Ramaphosa’s correction that Malema was instead an opposition politician from a minority party, and that Malema’s words were not government policy.

The “Kill the Boer” song, meanwhile, has been a locus of controversy since at least the onset of the Zuma presidency in 2009, and has been the subject of at least six rulings from Chapter 9 or judicial bodies.

The most recent of these was in May 2024, when the Supreme Court ruled that AfriForum — the complainant — had failed to make a case that the song amounted to hate speech given its well-known roots in the anti-apartheid liberation Struggle. 

What about the video of the farm murder crosses?


A New York Times headline on this matter sums it up: “Trump Claimed a Social Media Video Showed ‘Burial Sites’ of White Farmers. It Didn’t.”

As the video played, Trump said: “These are burial sites right here.”

This is false. The white crosses were erected along the road in Newcastle, KwaZulu-Natal, in 2020 as a protest against the murder of Glen and Vida Rafferty on their farm. The crosses have since been removed. 

The aerial video of these crosses was in many ways the piece de resistance of Trump’s show, because the crosses seemed to stretch for kilometres on end. But the protest was simply symbolic: there is no indication that there was a direct correlation between each cross and an actual murdered farmer.

As we noted yesterday, statistics around South African farm murders are one of the most hotly contested categories of figures, for two reasons. Firstly, lobby groups simply claim that the government’s figures are wrong; and secondly, the crimes are difficult to categorise because many crimes on farms do not involve “farmers”, per se.

Another symbolic memorial to farm murders, the Witkruis or Plaasmoorde Monument, along the NI between Mokopane and Polokwane, also features white crosses, and was recently highlighted by Elon Musk on his X account with the words “So many crosses”.

What about the paper handouts Trump gave Ramaphosa?


Trump stuffed into Ramaphosa’s hands a thick sheaf of printouts — probably the work of Harp once again — which he claimed amounted to further evidence of persecution of white South Africans that had been published “in the last few days”.

Exactly what was in the pile is unknown — but one article was clearly visible as Trump held it up to the camera.

The headline of the article was: “Let’s talk about Africa, which is where tribalism takes you”.

This article was published on a little-known blog called American Thinker in February 2025, by an author called Andrea Wildburg. 

The image from the blog brandished by Trump as evidence of “death, death, death”, showed Red Cross medics taking away corpses in body bags. It was a screengrab from a YouTube report on the sacking of the DRC city of Goma by Rwandan rebels in February 2025 — and had precisely nothing to do with South Africa. DM

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