Because President Trump deeply values accuracy and integrity in public conduct, he will be mortified to learn that a photo he brandished during his recent Oval Office meeting with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa perpetrated a massive deception. The photo was supposed to display dead white South African farmers—a Trump obsession—but instead, it showed body bags from the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is producing humanitarian horrors.
This abomination came as Trump ambushed Ramaphosa by displaying numerous printouts of web pages to illustrate a “genocide” against whites underway in his country. But Reuters now reports that one of the printouts displayed imagery taken from a Reuters video shot in Congo of humanitarian workers moving dead victims from the war with Rwanda-backed rebels.
Most obviously, this is another sign of Trump’s inability to produce evidence of his new pet conspiracy theory about huge masses of “white farmers” being killed in racial pogroms. But there’s another ugly irony here that shouldn’t pass unnoticed: The Trump administration has suspended foreign aid to Congo and the resettlement of refugees from that nation, thus abandoning countless victims of the very same real-life humanitarian catastrophe that he’s cherry-picking imagery from to portray an atrocity against whites that isn’t actually happening.
Plainly, a hapless Trump aide was tasked with finding web postings about murdered South African white farmers for Trump to wave in Ramaphosa’s face as part of some sort of humiliation ritual—probably dreamed up by Stephen Miller—designed to thrill white nationalists everywhere. As it happens, the video he showed Ramaphosa of crosses designed to depict a killing field full of white corpses also turned out to be a wild distortion.
Trump’s broader claim of a white genocide has similarly been debunked. Yet Trump has sought to feed this gutter conspiracy theory by resettling several dozen white Afrikaners in the United States, even as he’s suspended the resettlement of refugees from everywhere else in the world.
But there’s something particularly ghoulish about this new Reuters revelation. Trump held aloft what appeared to be a printout of a conservative blog post, which was broadly about Africa (and partly about South Africa as well) and featured a photo image lifted from a Reuters video about the Congo conflict. (Perhaps the aide googled “white farmers” and “South Africa,” found the blog post with the picture of victims in Congo, and printed it for Trump to cite as imagery of dead white Afrikaners?)
The Reuters video, which you can watch right here, depicts atrocities in the war between Congo and Rwanda. The Council on Foreign Relations describes this as “one of the largest and deadliest humanitarian crises in the world,” having left millions in need of basic food and medicine or seeking refuge abroad.
Indeed, just before Trump took over, a State Department report declared that it was prioritizing the resettlement of large numbers of refugees from that conflict, describing it as a “complex emergency” that has “intensified.”
But now that Trump has suspended refugee resettlement across the board—with the exception of white Afrikaners—an untold number of those Congolese refugees are barred from the United States.
What’s more, according to the United Nations, Trump’s cuts have “severely impacted” humanitarian efforts in Congo. Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International, argues that these are taking a toll on victims of the conflict there: The cuts, he says, “affected services for people displaced by the fighting, including emergency food aid, clean water, shelter, and emergency malnutrition support.”
In fairness, under Trump this conflict recently saw a partial diplomatic breakthrough, though this continued a process initiated by his predecessor. As The Washington Post’s David Ignatius reports, this achievement could ultimately make a real difference. But this doesn’t justify stalling resettlement of refugees from the war or dramatically curtailing foreign aid to the region.
“Trump has slashed programs supporting the victims,” Konyndyk said. “He has cut off refugee resettlement, leaving no escape valve for people displaced by that conflict. Then he uses an image of that conflict to promote his false narrative about South Africa. It’s absolutely grotesque.”
As an aside, if there were really mass atrocities targeting white people—crime statistics show general high crime in South Africa but no evidence that whites are being singled out—then you’d think far more of them would want to be coming here.
Yet Democratic aides on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee tell me they’ve asked the State Department for details on the number of Afrikaners who have applied to come to the United States and have not received an answer. Is there really an ongoing groundswell of white Afrikaners clamoring to come here, or did the administration have to work hard to find white victims willing to be resettled? We’ll soon find out.
As I argued recently, Trump’s “white genocide” imagery draws heavily on a kind of internationalized “great replacement theory” that’s popular among white nationalists. In this storytelling, embattled white populations around the world must come to each other’s rescue to avoid elimination. The “farmers” trope gives all this a producerist feel: The white populations are the salt of the earth in their homelands, under siege from shiftless, rootless, swarthy masses being manipulated against them by dark international forces or even by the globalists themselves.
Trump, Miller, and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt don’t use this precise language. But they constantly describe white South Africans as a “persecuted minority”—even as they taunt us with their refusal to settle genuine victims of mass persecution from the rest of Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the Middle East. The flaunting of this contrast is itself the intended message.
The depravity of it all was perfectly captured by Reuters video journalist Djaffar Al Katanty, who shot the image Trump used. “In view of all the world,” Al Katanty said, Trump manipulated his work to broadcast the story that “white people are being killed by Black people.”
The not-so-coded message is that the only victims of mass historical crimes who exist or merit our attention are white victims of nonwhites. All the rest will be summarily erased as matters of concern to us. The unabashed declaration of the power to replace actual historical crimes with mythological ones—ones featuring whites as world-historical victims—is the main event here.
You couldn’t ask for a clearer illustration of this than the transformation of victims in a genuine humanitarian horror in central Africa—ones we are slamming the door on—into phony evidence of an imaginary genocide against white South Africans—ones who are getting welcomed into our country by Trump with open arms.
