Trump Boosts South African 'White Genocide' Claim with a Shaky Source
What happened: During an Oval Office meeting with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa on May 21, U.S. President Donald Trump falsely claimed that there is a “white genocide” unfolding in South Africa. At one point, Trump held up a printout of an article from AmericanThinker.com (NewsGuard Trust Score: 22.5/100). As Trump displayed the publication, he referred to a photo accompanying the article and stated, “Look, here are burial sites all over the place. These are all white farmers that are being buried.”
Actually, the image, which occupies half the American Thinker page, was not taken in South Africa. Rather, the photo taken from a Reuters video shows Red Cross aid workers at a burial site in the Democratic Republic of Congo in February 2025 in the aftermath of a mass rape and murder incident, The Independent (Trust Score: 85/100) first reported.
The American Thinker article was headlined “Let’s talk about Africa, which is where tribalism takes you.” It stated that the South African government “isn’t even pretending anymore that its goal is anything other than destroying whites.” The article referred to several African countries, including the Democratic Republic of Congo. However, the accompanying photo taken from the Reuters video was not captioned. The only indication that the photo related to Congo was a source link below the image that linked to a YouTube video about the atrocities in Congo.
Context: American Thinker, a 22-year-old conservative website, has been found by NewsGuard to have repeatedly published false or egregiously misleading claims. This has been NewsGuard’s finding in seven reviews of the site since 2021, most recently in April 2025. (Reality Check members can read NewsGuard’s Nutrition Label for the site here.)
In the past year, NewsGuard found, American Thinker has published articles falsely stating that mail-in ballots led to widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, that then-Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz “groomed” and inappropriately touched a foreign exchange student when he was a teacher in Minnesota, and that the COVID-19 virus is manmade.
Actually: Crime statistics and findings from institutions that track genocide worldwide contradict the claim that there is a genocide against white farmers in South Africa.
Although South African Police Service crime statistics show that murder is rampant in the country, they do not indicate that white farmers are being systematically targeted. According to the Police Service, there were 26,232 murders in South Africa last year; 44 of the murder victims were from the farming community.
No international human-rights watchdog groups, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, have identified a “white genocide” in South Africa. No international courts have ruled that any group in South Africa is committing genocide against white South Africans. No political party in South Africa has claimed that genocide is occurring.
“The idea of a ‘white genocide’ taking place in South Africa is completely false,” Gareth Newham, the director of the governance, crime and justice program at South Africa’s Institute for Security Studies, told PBS News in May 2025. “As an independent institute tracking violence and violent crime in South Africa, if there was any evidence of either a genocide or targeted violence taking place against any group based on their ethnicity, we would be amongst the first to raise [the] alarm and provide the evidence to the world.”