Ordinarily, Donald Trump isn’t the kind of guy who’s overly concerned with evidence. The president relies on preconceived ideas, assorted conspiracy theories, rumors he’s heard via conservative media and routine assumptions he creates out of whole cloth, but he’s never shown any real interest in concepts such as proof and substantiation.
But when he sat down with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, and Trump wanted to make a case against his guest’s home country, the Republican suddenly became deeply invested in evidence, holding a pile of printed articles that he offered as support for his baseless claims about South Africa. The American president even showed a video intended to bolster his “white genocide” conspiracy theories: It featured what Trump said were “burial sites” of “over 1,000” white farmers in South Africa.
But the evidence of racial persecution against white South Africans was not what Trump said it was. The New York Times reported:
A New York Times analysis found that the footage instead showed a memorial procession on Sept. 5, 2020, near Newcastle, South Africa. The event, according to a local news website, was for a white farming couple in the area who the police said had been murdered in late August of that year. The crosses were planted in the days ahead of the event and were later removed.
The Washington Post came to the same conclusion about the validity of the video shown in the Oval Office. (An NBC News report didn’t include a related analysis.)
“These are burial sites right here. Burial sites. Over a thousand of white farmers,” Trump declared as if he were certain that his evidence was real.
He was plainly and demonstrably wrong. The American president didn’t just peddle conspiracy theories more commonly found on fringe websites, he also aired “video evidence” that he brazenly misrepresented.
It’s possible — if not likely — that White House staffers were to blame, since Trump almost certainly didn’t prepare the video himself. But the end result was the same: The American president invested his personal credibility in this presentation, hoping to bolster his monthslong offensive against South Africa, but his proof wasn’t real.
This was not the only problem with the contentious Oval Office gathering. As a separate Times analysis noted, Trump “seemed more intent on relaying the talking points from leaders of Afrikaner lobbying groups” than engaging in constructive diplomacy.
But the fact that he also presented bogus and misrepresented evidence — amplified by the White House via social media, in posts that have not been taken down — served as a timely reminder about Trump’s credibility crisis and his indifference toward reality-based foreign policy.
