President Donald Trump misidentified images of victims from the war between the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwandan-backed M23 rebels during a meeting with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa.
On Wednesday, Trump presented Ramaphosa with evidence of persecution against white South African farmers. This included a video montage of South African politician Julius Malema singing an inflammatory song calling for followers to “kill the Boer,” or white farmers, and a row of white crosses representing white farmers killed in attacks. He then held up a thick collection of printed-out articles on the persecution of white Afrikaners in South Africa, especially farmers.
Observers were quick to notice that one article displayed for the cameras didn’t match its description — a Feb. 25 article from American Thinker, a conservative magazine, titled “Let’s talk about Africa, which is where tribalism takes you.” The article showed a jarring image of men in hazmat suits burying body bags as onlookers observed.
“These are all white farmers that are being buried,” Trump said, holding up the article.
The Washington Examiner reached out to the White House for comment.
The image in question was a screenshot of a video published by Reuters on Feb. 3, showing humanitarian workers moving the corpses of victims of fighting between DRC government troops and M23 rebels in the city of Goma in the eastern DRC.
Trump touched on the war in the DRC during his meeting with Ramaphosa, touting his peace efforts in the region despite the United States having no major stake in the conflict.
The American Thinker article didn’t claim the image was from South Africa. The confusion likely resulted from the focus on South Africa within the article, which held up South Africa, Zimbabwe, and the Congo as examples of tribalism gone awry in Africa.
“The South African government, which has abandoned Nelson Mandela’s efforts to create racial harmony after generations of apartheid, isn’t even pretending anymore that its goal is anything other than destroying whites,” the article said, holding up the controversial Expropriation Act as a prime example.
The law allows for the seizure of farm land without compensation if the government determines that doing so is “just and equitable and in the public interest.”
The American Thinker article elsewhere denounced Ramaphosa’s administration as a “dysfunctional, race-obsessed Marxist government.”
In response to a question from Reuters, Andrea Widburg, managing editor at American Thinker and the author of the article, said Trump had “misidentified the image,” but that the article had covered Ramaphosa’s “dysfunctional, race-obsessed Marxist government,” and “pointed out the increasing pressure placed on white South Africans.”
The article was one of over a dozen held up by Trump — the rest appeared to be relevant to the topic, touching on reports of farm attacks, racial persecution of Afrikaners, and Afrikaner refugees fleeing the country. The first displayed article showed an elderly Afrikaner man who was beaten and hacked with a machete before being left for dead.
“Death, death, death, horrible death,” Trump said as he flipped through the articles.
The misidentification of the photo wasn’t the only error made during Trump’s presentation. The president mistakenly identified rows of white crosses along a South African roadway as the literal burial sites of Afrikaners killed in farm attacks. They were, in fact, only representative of murdered Afrikaner farmers.
TRUMP SHOWS VIDEO IN OVAL OFFICE TO SOUTH AFRICA’S PRESIDENT OF WHITE ‘BURIAL SITES’
Thousands of Afrikaner farmers have been murdered since the fall of Apartheid in 1994. Ramaphosa’s government insists the attacks are only part of a much larger crime wave consuming the country, but Afrikaner groups point to the highly disproportionate rates at which the small Boer minority is being murdered. Inflammatory rhetoric from some South African politicians, such as from former African National Congress Youth League leader and current Economic Freedom Fighter head Malena, has only added to concerns.
Trump characterized the South African government’s treatment of Afrikaners as a “genocide” in a press conference last week, a claim he didn’t walk back when confronted on during the Wednesday meeting.