Riley Mellen and Aric Toler at NYT:
In a White House meeting on Wednesday, President 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.
The misrepresentation of the footage took place during a stunning meeting in which Mr. Trump made false claims about a genocide against white farmers. Mr. Trump dimmed the lights to play the footage, presenting it as evidence of racial persecution against white South Africans.
US President Donald Trump brandished a stack of printed articles at the White House Wednesday that he claimed documented a genocide taking place against white people in South Africa.
Mixed into the deck of papers he unveiled before South African leader Cyril Ramaphosa, however, was a months-old blog post featuring a photo from the Democratic Republic of Congo.
"Death of people, death, death, death, horrible death, death," Trump said as he flipped through the headlines, which he said were published in "the last few days."
