Trump's Lie about Dead "White Farmers" Just Got Even More Grotesque

[Nevilledog]

https://newrepublic.com/article/195699/trump-ramaphosa-lie-dead-white-farmers

No paywall link
https://archive.li/40pEy

Because President Trump deeply values accuracy and integrity in public conduct, he will be mortified to learn that a photo he brandished during his recent Oval Office meeting with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa perpetrated a massive deception. The photo was supposed to display dead white South African farmers—a Trump obsession—but instead, it showed body bags from the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), which is producing humanitarian horrors.

This abomination came as Trump ambushed Ramaphosa by displaying numerous printouts of web pages to illustrate a “genocide” against whites underway in his country. But Reuters now reports that one of the printouts displayed imagery taken from a Reuters video shot in the DRC of humanitarian workers moving dead victims from the war with Rwanda-backed rebels.

Most obviously, this is another sign of Trump’s inability to produce evidence of his new pet conspiracy theory about huge masses of “white farmers” being killed in racial pogroms. But there’s another ugly irony here that shouldn’t pass unnoticed: The Trump administration has suspended foreign aid to DRC and the resettlement of refugees from that nation, thus abandoning countless victims of the very same real-life humanitarian catastrophe that he’s cherry-picking imagery from to portray an atrocity against whites that isn’t actually happening.

Plainly, a hapless Trump aide was tasked with finding web postings about murdered South African white farmers for Trump to wave in Ramaphosa’s face as part of some sort of humiliation ritual—probably dreamed up by Stephen Miller—designed to thrill white nationalists everywhere. As it happens, the video he showed Ramaphosa of crosses designed to depict a killing field full of white corpses also turned out to be a wild distortion.

*snip*