President Trump made the president of South Africa squirm with evidence of "white genocide" in his country during a fiery clash in the Oval Office.
It was the most dramatic example yet of Trump's advocacy on behalf of white Afrikaners who have faced hateful rhetoric, discriminatory policies and, some say, state-sanctioned killings under the country's post-apartheid government.
"Death, death, death," Trump said as he flipped through news clippings on farm murders.
Trump even had the lights dimmed down as he played a video montage of political leaders using anti-white rhetoric.
The clips featured Julius Malema, an opposition party leader infamous for his chants of "Kill the Boer." The Boers, another term for Afrikaners, are the descendants of Dutch, German, and Huguenot settlers who arrived in South Africa in the 17th century.
While he denied Trump's claims that white farmers face persecution, President Cyril Ramaphosa defended a new land reform law, which allows private property to be confiscated without compensation. Ramaphosa conceded the law is meant to "deal with the past," a reference to the apartheid era of white minority rule.
"Your government also has the right to expropriate land for public use," Ramaphosa said.
"And you're doing that," Trump shot back.
"You're taking people's land away from them," Trump said. "And those people in many cases are being executed. They're being executed, and they happen to be white, and most of them happen to be farmers," Trump said.
Trump is not the only one taking issue with Ramaphosa's land policies. The Democratic Alliance, which his part of Ramaphosa's coalition, has said the expropriation law violates property rights, and they are challenging it in court.
Ramaphosa insisted that South Africa respects property rights, even as he conceded that crime in rural areas remains a serious problem for people of different races.
"There is criminality in our country. People who do get killed, unfortunately, through criminal activity are not only white people, majority of them are black people," Ramaphosa said.
At one point, Trump asked Ramaphosa why he had not arrested Julius Malema for inciting violence. Ramaphosa dismissed Malema, whose Economic Freedom Fighters party is the fourth largest in South Africa, as a fringe opposition figure.
"That is not government policy. We have a multiparty democracy in South Africa that allows people to express themselves," he said.
Trump disagreed, saying, "That's not a small party. That was a stadium that holds 100,000 people, and I hardly saw an empty seat."
The Supreme Court of South Africa has ruled that Malema's anti-Boer chant, which is rooted in the struggle against apartheid, is not hate speech.
Trump suggested that Afrikaners are facing a form of reverse discrimination, stating, "This is sort of the opposite of apartheid. What's happening now is never reported. Nobody knows about it."
The Oval Office exchange comes after Trump canceled foreign aid to South Africa while opening America's doors to white refugees fleeing persecution there.
Ramaphosa has called a group of 59 Afrikaners who accepted Trump's asylum offer "cowards" who are abandoning a responsibility to right the wrongs of apartheid.
