What did Donald Trump do today?

He tried another Oval Office ambush today, but it didn't go so well.

Trump hosted South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office today. Trump has been floating false conspiracy theories about "white genocide" at the hands of the South African government. Today, backed by Cabinet members armed with talking points, he peppered Ramaphosa with false claims and fraudulent "evidence" of that non-existent "genocide" taken from fringe websites.

South Africa does have a problem with violence and a high murder rate. But there is no genocide, as virtually all white South Africans themselves say, and Black South Africans are murdered at a higher rate than the white minority. As CNN put it in a fact check:

Claims of genocide can sometimes be difficult to adjudicate. This claim is easy. The facts show that the genocide President Donald Trump suggests might be happening is not happening – and that crime against White farmers in South Africa represents a tiny fraction of the country’s overall crime.

The most recent South African official data shows that the country had 19,696 murders from April 2024 through December 2024 – and that the victim in just 36 of these murders, about 0.2%, was linked to farms or smaller agricultural holdings.

Further, only seven of the 36 victims were farmers. (South Africa has Black farmers, too; the official data is not broken down by race.) The other 29 victims included farm employees, who tend to be Black. 

Trump made no secret of the fact that he was acting on the direction of Elon Musk, his political patron, whose family fortune is rooted in the white supremacist Apartheid era. He brought up Musk's name unprompted, saying, "This is what Elon wanted."

Musk, who is the wealthiest person in the world, seems to relish the idea that he is a persecuted minority. But he's also actively trying to force the South African government to pay for his Starlink satellite service. Musk has been caught using the U.S. State Department to strong-arm other African countries into purchasing it. 

Trump didn't say why, if he thought Ramaphosa's government was committing genocide, he was welcomed as a guest at the White House.

At one point Trump brandished a sheet of paper and said, "Look, here's burial sites all over the place. These are all white farmers that are being buried." The image, which showed Red Cross workers handling body bags, was taken in the aftermath of violence following a prison break in the the Congolese city of Goma, about 2,000 miles from South Africa. The image was a screen capture of a YouTube video that had been posted to a fringe right-wing blog.

Trump receives a daily briefing from 18 intelligence agencies, none of which rely on out-of-context blog photos posted by American civilians watching YouTube. It's not clear who gave Trump his "intelligence" today, or how much of it he actually believes.

Trump seems to have been trying to reprise his February ambush of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, doing a sort of insult-comic roast for the benefit of domestic audiences. But Ramaphosa was ready for it and fired back, at one point openly mocking Trump's acceptance of an extorted bribe from Qatar: "I'm sorry I don't have a plane to give you."

Trump, apparently not realizing he was being made fun of, replied earnestly, "I'd take it. If your country offered the US Air Force a plane, I would take it."

Why does this matter?

• If Trump knows better but is lying about genocide because he was told to, then he's not morally fit to serve.
  

• If Trump isn't lying, but simply accepting easily disproved conspiracy theories because he was told to, then he's not mentally fit to serve.