U.S. President Donald Trump publicly ambushed South African President Cyril Ramaphosa at a White House meeting on Wednesday, falsely claiming the latter‘s government had “executed” white farmers to expropriate their land.
In an extraordinary Oval Office scene, Mr. Trump launched an apparently pre-planned attack of his South African counterpart while television cameras rolled. Using both a movie and a stack of articles, Mr. Trump accused Mr. Ramaphosa of perpetrating a program of violent seizures of white-owned farms in his country.
“You‘re taking people’s land away from them,” Mr. 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.”
As Mr. Ramaphosa tried to protest “no, no,” Mr. Trump claimed that “when they take the land, they kill the white farmer. And when they kill the white farmer, nothing happens to them.”
The South African leader had …