South African Leader Denies Genocide as Trump Points to White Cross Memorial

The footage also showed a long road of white crosses lined up alongside both sides of a road, in which cars were parked for passengers to pay their respects to the dead, The Christian Post reported.

🚨 JUST SHOWN IN THE OVAL OFFICE: Proof of Persecution in South Africa. pic.twitter.com/rER1l8sqAU

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) May 21, 2025

"Those crosses represent dead white people, mostly white farmers," Trump said, later adding, "Each white cross, approximately one thousand of them, represents a white farmer or their family member who was killed. The cars are stopped to honor them, and it's a terrible sight. I've never seen anything like it, with crosses lining both sides of the road for all those people who were killed."

Ramaphosa, in his response, explained his country's constitutional protections of lawn ownership and stressed the need to "deal with the past."

"Our constitution guarantees and protects the sanctity of tenure of land ownership, and that constitution protects all South Africans with regard to land ownership," he said. "However, we do say, because we've got to deal with the past, the government, and as your government also has the right to expropriate land for public use … we've never really gotten underway with that, and we are going to be doing that."

However, Trump then alleged Ramaphosa of confiscating land from white farmers on the basis of their ethnicity. 

"You're taking people's land away … and those people, in many cases, are being executed," he said. "They're being executed, and they happen to be white, and most of them happen to be farmers, and that's a tough situation."

Prior to showing the footage, a reporter asked Ramaphosa, "What will it take for you to be convinced there's no white genocide in South Africa?"

"It will take President Trump listening to the voices of South Africans, some of whom are his good friends, like those who are here," Ramaphosa replied and pointed toward South African golfers Ernie Els and Retief Goosen, who accompanied him to the White House. "... It will take President Trump to listen to them. I will not be repeating what I've been saying."

"I would say if there was African genocide, I can bet you these three gentlemen would not be here, including my minister of agriculture," he added. "He would not be with me. So it will take him, President Trump, listening to their stories, to their perspective. That is the answer to your question."

The president also accused the media of not reporting the plight of Afrikaners due to ignorance and racial bias, including shutting down what he deemed a "terrible reporter" from NBC after trying to interject the moment with a question about the Qatari jet gifted to the Trump administration this week.

 "We have a very corrupt media that won't even report this. If this were the other way around, it would be the biggest story," Trump said. "Apartheid was terrible and reported all the time as the biggest threat. What's happening now, sort of the opposite of apartheid, is never reported, and nobody knows about it."

"All we know is we're being inundated with white farmers from South Africa, and it's a big problem."

Trump signed an executive order in February which labeled Afrikaners as refugees and accused the South African government of enacting a law that permitted the confiscation of Afrikaners' agricultural properties without providing adequate compensation.

Per Fox News, about 50 Afrikaners were flown to the United States as refugees last week, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio saying there's "more to come."

WATCH: BREAKING NEWS: Trump, South Africa President Have Shocking Argument about White Farmer Death Claims

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Milton Quintanilla is a freelance writer and content creator. He is a contributing writer for CrosswalkHeadlines and the host of the For Your Soul Podcast, a podcast devoted to sound doctrine and biblical truth. He holds a Masters of Divinity from Alliance Theological Seminary.