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.
New Republic
Your facts don't matter any more.
This abomination came as Trump ambushed Ramaphosa by displaying numerous printouts of web pages to illustrate a “genocide” against whites underway in his country.
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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.
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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.
Reality is whatever Trump says it is. Get with the program.
Trump showed President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa a social media video of a rural road lined with white crosses and hundreds of vehicles.
Mr. Trump told Mr. Ramaphosa that the footage showed “burial sites” of “over 1,000” white farmers in South Africa.
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.
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Trump dimmed the lights to play the footage, presenting it as evidence of racial persecution against white South Africans.
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Elon Musk — who is originally from South Africa and is one of Mr. Trump’s advisers — had posted the video on the social media site X at least twice before [the Ramaphosa] meeting.
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A White House official told The Times each cross represented a white farmer who had been killed but did not comment on why Mr. Trump had characterized the video as showing burial sites.
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South Africa has an exceptionally high murder rate, but police statistics do not show that white South Africans or farmers are more vulnerable to violent crime than other people.
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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.
NYT
