AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: South African President Cyril Ramaphosa visited the White House Wednesday, where President Trump used their joint Oval Office appearance to push false claims that White Afrikaner farmers are facing a genocide. During an extraordinary confrontation broadcast on live TV, Trump had the lights dimmed and ordered video clips played showing people calling for violence against white farmers in South Africa. This is President Ramaphosa and Trump responding to a reporter’s question before Trump started playing the video.

REPORTER 1: What will it take for you to be convinced that there’s no white genocide in South Africa?

PRESIDENT CYRIL RAMAPHOSA: Well, I can answer that for the president. It’s for him — no, seriously.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I’d rather have him answer it.

PRESIDENT CYRIL RAMAPHOSA: Yeah, I’m going to answer that. It will be — 

REPORTER 1: Our president will respond to you.

PRESIDENT CYRIL RAMAPHOSA: Yeah, let me —

REPORTER 1: Thank you, Mr. President.

PRESIDENT CYRIL RAMAPHOSA: It will take President Trump listening to the voices of South Africans, some of whom are his good friends, like those who are here. When we have talks between us around a quiet table, it will take President Trump to listen to them. I’m not going to be repeating what I’ve been saying. I would say, if there was Afrikaner farmer genocide, I can bet you these three gentlemen would not be here, including my minister of agriculture. He would not be with me. So, it will take him, President Trump, listening to their stories, to their perspective. That is the answer to your question.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: But, Mr. President, I must say that we —

REPORTER 2: President Trump — 

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: No, no. Wait. We have thousands of stories talking about it.

PRESIDENT CYRIL RAMAPHOSA: Sure.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: And we have documentaries. We have news stories on it. Is Natalie here, somebody here to turn that? I could show you a couple of things. And I would — I just — I have to — it has to be responded to.

PRESIDENT CYRIL RAMAPHOSA: Yeah, sure.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Let me see the articles, please, if you would. And turn — excuse me. Turn the lights down. Turn the lights down. And just put this on. It’s right behind you.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: As the video played, President Trump falsely claimed there’s a place in South Africa with a thousand graves of white farmers.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Now, this is very bad. These are the — these are burial sites right here, burial sites, over a thousand, of white farmers. And those cars are lined up to pay love on a Sunday morning. Each one of those white things you see is a cross. And there’s approximately a thousand of them. They’re all white farmers, the family of white farmers. And those cars aren’t driving. They’re stopped there to pay respects to their family member who was killed. And it’s a terrible sight. I’ve never seen anything like it.

AMY GOODMAN: The video President Trump was talking about did not actually show any real graves. They were mock graves, part of a protest against farm violence. South African police data show farm murders comprise less than 0.2% of South African murders between October and December of last year.

This month, the Trump administration granted refugee status to a group of white South Africans, even as it suspended refugee resettlement for almost everyone else in the world.

Trump’s claims of white genocide come after South Africa brought a case at the International Court of Justice in The Hague accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, where Palestinian officials say Israeli attacks have killed over 61,000 people.

And one of his closest advisers, Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, is also from South Africa and is part of that group of people pushing these theories.

For more, we go to Johannesburg, South Africa, where we’re joined by Lebohang Pheko. She is senior research fellow and political economist at Trade Collective Works, founding fellow at the Thabo Mbeki School of Governance at the University of South Africa.

Welcome to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us. Can you respond to this spectacle in the Oval Office yesterday?

LEBOHANG PHEKO: So, yeah. Thanks, Amy.

The whole spectacle that we saw yesterday is really in keeping with the narrative of this white genocide. But it’s a convenient myth, especially in the context of a declining empire. So, this is a sort of white supremacist tactic, which is aware that its days are numbered, and it’s kind of trying to concoct and invent imagined threats to galvanize support and to galvanize sympathy. And I think I’m very wary of the notion of even calling it white victimhood, because I consider it an act of aggression, an act of aggressive white malice, in fact.

And what this does is that the velocity of media amplification, as well as the endorsements by — you know, by billionaires like, as you mentioned, Elon Musk and the few other prominent former South Africans who, by bizarre coincidence, have congregated around the Trump administration — and perhaps it’s not coincidental at all — like Peter Thiel, like Joel Pollak and a few others, is that they have then exploited their sense of white grievance. So, these are grievances that have been around since the post-1994 dispensation in pockets, but nobody takes them really, really seriously, and they’re seen as spurious apartheid nostalgic sentiments.

And what has happened, of course, in the last few months, with the ascendancy of people like Elon Musk and Joel Pollak and the proximity to somebody like, you know, Donald Trump, who seems to have a great appetite for these spurious white supremacist ideologies, is that they mirror his own extremely skewed worldview and, of course, his own racial tendencies. And they’ve amplified — their power, their velocity, their financial muscle have given them the ability to amplify this. And we see this, of course, that Elon Musk has used Twitter, X — whatever we’re calling it this week — to amplify some very problematic and extremely dangerous propaganda.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And also, if you could talk, overall, of the steps the Trump administration has taken against South Africa since they came — it came into office? I mean, this is just one aspect of it. Secretary of State Marco Rubio skipping a G20 meeting earlier this year, claiming that South Africa is what he called — the government’s, the present government’s anti-Americanism, he said. Trump has also stopped foreign aid to South Africa and set 30% reciprocal tariffs in April, though now that has been paused for a 90-day review.

LEBOHANG PHEKO: So, these, the tariffs, are, of course, universal. We know that Donald Trump went on this tariff spree a few weeks ago, and that South Africa was but one of many recipients of that unfortunate trade aggression.

The other thing is that, of course, we should be mindful that the use of tariffs in this regard is really — not only is it aggressive, it’s also — it’s extraneous. It is actually outside the World Trade Organization regulations. And even though I am no sponsor and no praising of the World Trade Organization — I think it, in and of itself, is a imbalanced, neocolonial instrument — it has to be said that it has brought into — that the behavior of Donald Trump and the Trump administration towards South Africa and towards the global economic architecture in recent weeks and months illustrates that this kind of maverick, John Wayne approach that he seems to be taking — and that it’s really trying to hark back to some sort of an old Western style. It’s just like watching an old Western movie unfold.

And when you mention, you know, the aggression that’s taken place against South Africa recently, I think what’s also quite interesting and that many of us are noting is the mirroring and the resonance between the grievance of whiteness in this country and the grievances, the invented grievances, that people like Donald Trump are inventing, this notion that there are — that, you know, there’s replacement theory and so forth.

I think, in material terms, South Africa is actually relatively wealthy. The way, of course, that we sometimes distribute our funds and spend our resources is a conversation for another day. But as a country, we’re actually quite wealthy. And I think that this is what — it pains many of us that we had to be placed in a situation, or we chose to be placed in a situation, event, to almost apologize for ourselves and to defend spurious and absolutely toxic lies.

AMY GOODMAN: Lebohang, I wanted to read you Naomi Klein’s quote. “Staging a show-and-tell about a fake genocide during a real genocide to the government that has done the most to seek justice for that real genocide is designed to break our brains. They know what they are doing.” Your final comments, as even the 59 refugees who came, one of them has been researched sending out and retweeting antisemitic comments against Jews? And, of course, we know about Elon Musk, South African, who did the “Heil Hitler” salute.

LEBOHANG PHEKO: So, I mean, the 59 so-called — I think we should be cautious. I mean, 59, 49. We should be cautious of calling them “refugees,” firstly, because it certainly cheapens the many displaced people across the world who are truly unable to return to their countries for fear of persecution and killing.

Secondly, I think that we need to dispose of the idea that all Afrikaners are farmers. They are not.

Thirdly, we also need to dispose of the idea that only Afrikaners work this land. And I think that the way that their farming expertise has been centered is deeply offensive. The farmworkers, the thousands of farmworkers who die, often at the hands of farm owners, white farm owners, is an under — is an absolutely underrepresented and underspoken phenomena in this whole scenario.

And I think that we should also reimagine what a multilateral world would look like if it decentered this kind of white malice, and if it actually decentered these manufactured and, you know, convenient truths that people like Trump and his ilk are spewing. And we can also see that there’s this resonance across the world. It’s not just the United States. It’s Italy, it’s Germany, it’s the United Kingdom and so on. And I think whiteness, in general, is in crisis, and it’s responding with great vindictiveness and toxicity.

AMY GOODMAN: Lebohang Pheko, we want to thank you so much for being with us, senior research fellow and political economist at Trade Collective Works. That does it for our show. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh. Thanks for joining us.