Donald Trump claimed Australia is being inundated with white Afrikaner farmers who are fleeing genocide in South Africa as he held a tense Oval Office meeting with the country’s president.
The US President effectively accused South African leader Cyril Ramaphosa of overseeing state-sanctioned mass murder of the country’s white ethnic minority.
He claimed many Afrikaners were being killed and their land forcibly taken, prompting others to flee to the United States and Australia.
‘You take a look at Australia, they’re being inundated and we’re being inundated with people that want to get out,’ Trump said on Wednesday.
‘Their farm is valueless and they just want to get out with their life. This is a very serious situation, but if we had a real press it would be exposed.’
Trump made Ramaphosa watch a video which purportedly backed up his claim and also held up printouts of various newspaper articles as evidence.
One of the clippings included a piece written by the Daily Mail’s Sue Reid in February, which reported that 20,000 Afrikaners had inquired at the US Embassy in South Africa about seeking refugee status.
Trump’s administration has so far admitted 59 white Afrikaner refugees from South Africa.
Donald Trump has claimed Australia is inundated with white Afrikaner famers who are fleeing an alleged genocide in South Africa in a tense meeting with the country’s President
The US President effectively accused South African leader Cyril Ramaphosa (the pair are pictured together) of overseeing state-sanctioned mass murder of the country’s white ethnic minority in a bizarre and heated Oval Office exchange
Another of the clippings included two reports from Australia’s news.com.au dating from 2017 and 2018, and a television editorial by Sky News Australia’s Rita Panahi, the Sydney Morning Herald reported.
‘You’re taking people’s land away from them,’ Trump told Ramaphosa.
‘We have not,’ Ramaphosa responded, adding that the number of white farmers being killed in the country was far outnumbered by black murder victims.
Trump added: ‘And those people in many cases are being executed. And they happen to be white, and most of them happen to be farmers.
‘That’s a tough situation, I don’t know how you explain that. How do you explain that?
‘We have thousands of people that want to come into our country. They’re also going to Australia, in a smaller number.’
‘They’re white farmers and they feel like they’re going to die.’
While the encounter was tense and awkward at points, it did not descend into a full-scale shouting match like the infamous exchange with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky earlier this year.
South African farmers and residents support Donald Trump outside the US embassy in Pretoria
Trump also branded an NBC reporter a ‘jerk’ after he asked why Trump was accepting refugees from South Africa and not Afghanistan and Venezuela.
‘Well, this is a group, NBC, that is truly fake news,’ Trump replied.
Trump then vented his fury on journalist Peter Alexander for using the South Africa briefing to instead ask about Trump accepting a gift of a new plane from the government of Qatar that he could use as Air Force One.
‘No. 1, you don’t have what it takes to be a reporter, you’re not smart enough,’ Trump told the reporter.
‘For you to go onto a subject that – a jet that was given to the United States Air Force, which was a very nice thing,’ the president continued. ‘You ought to go back to your studio at NBC.’
He added: ‘You are a disgrace, no more questions from you!’
In 2018, Australia’s then Home Affairs minister Peter Dutton said that persecuted white farmers in South Africa ‘deserve special attention’ as he proposed offering them special refugee visas.
However, a surge of South Africans seeking refugee status were rejected in 2020 because government officials claimed the violence in the country is widespread, random and opportunistic, rather than targeted.
‘The risk of murder and serious physical/sexual assaults is one faced by the population of the country generally and not by the applicants personally,’ said one of the rejection letters, quoted in The Australian newspaper.
Reliable figures on how many farmers had been killed in South Africa were hard to come by, as the government crime figures do not break out their numbers from the national total.
Most estimates range from the high double-figures per year into the low hundreds.
South Africa has one of the world’s highest murder rates, with an average of 72 a day, according to Reuters.
There were 26,232 murders nationwide in 2024.