This week was a rather interesting week for President Donald Trump and his White House meetings, especially in regard to an Oval Office gathering involving the South African president.
The media described the event as an “ambush” by Trump on the South African leader, and now the White House is scrambling to defend his actions.
Trump may have made a massive misstep when he was holding a press conference with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa.
Trump’s interest in the issue of racially-driven violence in Ramaphosa's country warranted, but he came armed with a lot of bad facts. Shame on me for not digging deeper into this before I did my report on yesterday's meeting and completely defended Trump.
Trump showed the South African president pictures of alleged graves of white farmers, and my impression from the meeting was that those sites all involved recent burials.
The president also played a video of humanitarian workers removing dead bodies, claiming these were all corpses of white farmers who had been killed by black South Africans.
First, the video that was shown by Trump of aid workers removing bodies was verified as Reuters footage from Feb. 3 reporting on a battle involving Rwanda-backed M23 rebels. The footage was reportedly taken in the Congolese city of Goma, so this was completely unrelated.
As another example, the picture that Trump showed of graves of the alleged dead white farmers appears to have been from the Witkruis Monument, where relatives have planted white crosses in memory of victims of farm attacks.
South Africa does have an extremely high murder rate, with more than 26,000 killings in the last year alone. But, of those murders, there were “only” 44 tied to the farming industry, with eight of them being actual farmers. Data from AfriForum claims there are about 50 farm murders per year. That clearly needs to be investigated and rectified, but I just feel that Trump misrepresented this in his presentation to the South African president.
Again, I don’t want to downplay the seriousness of these attacks, because there is clearly a problem, but it is not helping Trump or conservatives when he calls out another president for human rights violations on national TV, and he is bringing bogus “evidence” to the presser.
After Trump’s presser, Yamiche Alcindor with NBC News called out White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt over the credibility of the information presented by Trump, stating, "We know that that was not true and that the video wasn't true.”
Leavitt snapped back, "What's unsubstantiated about the video? The video shows crosses that represent the dead bodies of people who were racially persecuted by their government. In fact, The Associated Press, of all places, has a picture of that very monument in the caption from The Associated Press is ‘Each cross marks a white farmer who has been killed in a farm murder.’"
Leavitt went on, "So it is substantiated. But it's not just by that video and the physical evidence that everybody saw on display in the Oval Office, but also by another outlet in this from The Associated Press. So you should take it up with them if you believe the claim is unsubstantiated. And that's a ridiculous line of questioning."
This is a case in which everyone is partially right, and everyone is partially wrong. Again, attacks against white farmers in South Africa is a real issue, but it is not quite what Trump was making it appear to be. And the media has way overreacted regarding Trump calling out President Ramaphosa. There are clear human rights violations taking place, I just wish Trump would have had the right evidence and that someone would have verified that information before he went on national TV. It just makes him look foolish, not to mention how we look for taking his claim at face value. Again, I should have dug deeper into his claim, and I own that. I have to better, period.
