White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt sparred with a reporter Thursday as she attempted to dispute a video played by President Donald Trump that showed the graves of South African farmers.
Trump played a video montage Thursday of the opposition party in South Africa calling to kill the Boers, a term referring to white farmers, and a camera shot of a site where dead white farmers are said to be buried. The reporter claimed that the graves are not of white South Africans who were murdered, leading Leavitt to state that her “line of questioning” was “ridiculous.”
“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 the fact that they are now dead and their government did nothing about it. Are you disputing that?” Leavitt said.
“I’m disputing the fact that the video showed what the president claimed it showed, because it did not show that. But even more, who at the White House is verifying the videos that the president shows and what protocols are in place when there’s unsubstantiated information being put out for the world and world leaders to show?” the reporter asked.
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The press secretary disputed that the video was “unsubstantiated,” and cited The Associated Press’ (AP) own images of The White Cross Monument in Polokwane, South Africa. The hillside has arrays of several white crosses to mark “a white farmer who has been killed in a farm murder,” according to the AP’s caption displayed under an image of the memorial site.
“What’s unsubstantiated about the video? The video shows crosses that represent the dead bodies of people who are racially persecuted by their government. In fact, The Associated Press, of all places, has a picture of that very monument and the caption from The Associated Press is ‘each cross marks a white farmer who has been killed in a farm murder.’ So it is substantiated, not just by that video and the physical evidence that everybody saw on display in the Oval Office, but also by another outlet in this room, The Associated Press. So, you should take it up with them if you believe the claim is unsubstantiated and that’s a ridiculous line of questioning.”
Trump played the video during his bilateral meeting with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in an attempt to dispute the South African leader’s claim that there is no genocide in his country. Trump pointed to the shot of the burial site and said that about a thousand white farmers are buried there.
“Burial sites. Right here. Burial sites. Over a thousand white farmers and those cars are lined up to pay love on a Sunday morning. Each one of those white things you see is a cross. And there is approximately a thousand of them. They are all white farmers, the family of white farmers. And those cars aren’t driving. They are stopped there to pay respects to their family member who was killed,” Trump said.
The video also showed members of the opposition party calling to kill white farmers by shooting and “cutting their throat[s].” At the conclusion of the video, Ramaphosa told Trump that the utterances made in the video are not “government policy.”
White House adviser Elon Musk, a South African-born native who was present at the meeting, accused the country of blatantly discriminating against “anyone who is not black” in a May 16 X post and called for racism in South Africa to come to an end. In a separate post, he stated that South Africa’s alleged racist laws were simply “Apartheid with a new name.”
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