Karoline Leavitt Snaps When Asked About Trump’s White Genocide Rant

The U.S. president’s meeting with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa Wednesday featured a clip cooked up by the White House falsely alleging “white genocide” in the post-apartheid nation. But when pressed as to why Donald Trump lied that thousands of white farmers had been “murdered” in South Africa, administration officials balked.

“The president showed a video that he said showed more than 1,000 burial sites of White South Africans that he said were murdered,” said NBC News’s Yamiche Alcindor, during a press briefing Thursday. “We know that that was not true, and that the video wasn’t true. So I wonder, why did the president choose to show that?”

“No, it is true that the video showed the crosses,” said White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt. “The video showed images of crosses in South Africa about white farmers who have been killed and politically persecuted because of the color of their skin, and those crosses are representing their lives and that they are now dead and their government did nothing about it.”

The clip in question showed a thin strip of highway from Newcastle and Normandein in South Africa. It was not a “burial site” as Trump had claimed, locals told the BBC Thursday. Instead, it was a “temporary memorial” to symbolically commemorate murdered farmers across the country. South Africa has 64 million people in it, but every year more than 26,000 people are murdered, making the country’s murder rate roughly nine times higher than that of the United States.

Studies indicate that the vast majority of murder victims in South Africa are Black or mixed-race men between the ages of 15 and 44 and that most of them are economically disadvantaged.

South Africa notoriously maintained its oppressive system of apartheid through the early 1990s, segregating Black South Africans from white residents and depriving them of civil and political power.

Despite that history, the world’s richest man—and richest white Afrikaner, Elon Musk, has used his platform to push the narrative that South Africa oppresses white people, particularly white people of means, claiming that the nation unfairly restricts white citizens via “racist laws.” (Ramaphosa offered Musk a Starlink contract ahead of the head of state’s meeting with Trump, Bloomberg reported Tuesday, in spite of the fact that Musk’s business doesn’t fit the parameters of South Africa’s Black Economic Empowerment laws.)

Even white South Africans have protested that claims of a “white genocide” in their country are false.

“There’s no sign of it, never has been. In fact, Whites are economically the strongest group” in the country, Piet Croucamp, an academic at North-West University in South Africa, told CBS News. “Sixty-four percent of all boardrooms in South Africa are still White. The average incomes of White South Africans are vastly higher than Black South Africans’.… They have better schools, they have better education, private health care. This is the land of milk and honey if you’re white.”

President Trump is refusing to release the guest list of his pay-to-pay crypto dinner, as his press secretary Karoline Leavitt argues that the dinner is in his “personal time.”

“On the president’s dinner tonight, will the White House commit to making the list of the attendees public so people can see who’s paying for that kind of access to the president?” a reporter asked Leavitt at the White House press briefing on Thursday.

“Well as you know, Garret, this question has been raised with the president. I have also addressed the dinner tonight; the president is attending it in his personal time, it is not a White House dinner, it is not taking place here at the White House,” Leavitt responded, ignoring the specific question about who was going to be at this dinner. “Certainly I can raise that question and try to get you an answer for it.”

The dinner will be held at Trump’s private golf club in northern Virginia on Thursday evening for the top 220 holders of the president’s cryptocurrency—after an auction that brought in $147,586,796.41. The event is being promoted as the “most EXCLUSIVE INVITATION in the world,” according to an email about the event. The top 25 buyers will get an “ultra-exclusive private VIP reception” and “Special VIP Tour” with the president.

All of the donors/guests of this event will be completely anonymous, leading to legitimate questions about corruption and foreign influence, like the one Leavitt refused to answer. Many of the buyers are foreign, as well, based in countries like Singapore and Hong Kong—directly contradicting the “America First” narrative that Trump has built his brand on.

The top spender, holding close to $18.5 million of Trump’s coin, is called “SUN” and is held by a Seychelles-based crypto exchange known as HTX. Justin Sun, a Chinese national accused of fraud, known for spending $6.2 million on a banana and then eating it, is on HTX’s board and already has a financial relationship with Trump.

The president is having a private dinner for anonymous foreigners who bought his cryptocurrency—a scam in and of itself—and is acting as if he’s just taking a personal day that will have no impact on American politics.

“The sitting president appears to be selling personal cryptocurrency while in office, granting access to people who buy it, and thereby enriching his business and his family. It’s gobsmacking,” Senator Jon Ossoff said to Politico earlier this month. “I’d like to hear one Republican senator defend it. Any self-respecting Congress would demand an accounting of everyone trading this coin who has any business before the government.”

The Trump administration has escalated its attacks on academic freedom by barring Harvard University from enrolling international students.

The New York Times reports, citing three unnamed sources, that the White House told the university of the ban after back-and-forth discussions between White House officials and the university about whether a records request from the government was legal.

“I am writing to inform you that effective immediately, Harvard University’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification is revoked,” Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem wrote in a letter to the institution.

The decision means that the university will not be able to enroll students on F- or J- nonimmigrant visas for the 2025–2026 academic year. Harvard currently has nearly 7,000 international students, making up 27 percent of the school’s student body. In a press release, Noem said that these students must transfer or lose their legal status.

Earlier this month, President Trump threatened Harvard with the loss of its tax-exempt status, and in April, Noem demanded the university turn over records on the “illegal and violent” activities of its foreign student visa holders, threatening that if the university didn’t comply, its “privilege of enrolling foreign students” would end.

The university ended up sending some student information to the Department of Homeland Security but did not specify which records were turned over. Noem’s letter called the submitted records “insufficient” and said that they didn’t follow “simple reporting requirements.”

“This administration is holding Harvard accountable for fostering violence, antisemitism, and coordinating with the Chinese Communist Party on its campus,” Noem said in the press release. “It is a privilege, not a right, for universities to enroll foreign students and benefit from their higher tuition payments to help pad their multibillion-dollar endowments. Harvard had plenty of opportunity to do the right thing. It refused.”

“They have lost their Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification as a result of their failure to adhere to the law. Let this serve as a warning to all universities and academic institutions across the country,” Noem added.

The university continues to lose more federal grants each day, the latest $60 million in cuts coming Monday. The new ban will be well received by conservatives, who have long accused higher education in the U.S. of being a bastion of liberal thought. Many on the right continue to accuse universities of stoking criticism of Israel by allowing protests against Israel’s war in Gaza over the past year. Those grievances have culminated in threatening Harvard’s very existence.

This story has been updated.

A federal judge has blocked President Trump and Education Secretary Linda McMahon from carrying out an executive order to eliminate the Department of Education.

On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Myong Joun in Boston issued a preliminary injunction stopping the Trump administration from carrying out the president’s March executive order to dismantle the agency.

“Today we take a very historic action that was 45 years in the making,” Trump said at the time. “Everybody knows it’s right. The Democrats know it’s right, and I hope they’re going to vote for it because ultimately it may come before them.”

Joun disagreed, stating that the executive order painted a “stark picture of the irreparable harm that will result from financial uncertainty and delay, impeded access to vital knowledge on which students and educators rely, and loss of essential services for America’s most vulnerable student populations.”

“The record abundantly reveals that defendants’ true intention is to effectively dismantle the department without an authorizing statute,” Joun wrote, condemning the administration for trying to abolish a department without approval from Congress.

Joun also called for the reinstatement of employees who were fired from the department by the Department of Government Efficiency. “Restore the department to the status quo,” he wrote in his ruling.

Trump has yet to comment on the decision.