writes on the recent failed attempt by the United States President, Donald Trump to ambush South African President, Cyril Ramaphosa during a meeting at the former’s Oval Office in the White House, Washington DC.

On Wednesday May 21, 2025, the world watched live on kinds of multimedia platforms and channels as the perennially divisive President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, mounted a fierce, false and failed claim of “genocide” by the majority Black, indigenous people against the White, minority communities of farmers and farm owners. For radical and racially-polarizing impact, most of owners, inheritors, allies and international sympathizers and far-right activists and confederacy of ideological soulmates of the apartheid and post-apartheid period sometimes refer to their misleading drumbeat of divisive distortion as “White genocide” perpetrated by Black Africans and some non-European people in South Africa.

Hence, Trump’s clumsy efforts and embarrassing scene at the Oval Office in his meeting with South Africa’s affable President Cyril Ramaphosa was another kind of “mission impossible.”

He sought to ambush and destroy the credibility of the affable and well-spoken business mogul, Ramaphosa. He failed! He seemed petty and refused to listen to factual guidance.

To be sure, there are deep, heated and contentious hardlines and positions by all sides, especially the dispossessed Black Africans who still protest that it is a gross injustice and a continuation of the apartheid era political economy, subjugation and domination that Whites with only 7.20% of the population of the resource-rich South Africa will keep 73% of the choice, farmlands of the country that the great Nelson Mandela led to a multi-racial democracy in 1994. During his presidency, he spoke to the people in Bothaville (and by extension to the entire country) when the attacks on mainly White farmers had started that South Africans should tackle “the complex problem of crime on our farms, as elsewhere, demands long-term solutions.”

I have been to South Africa; first with the former President Bill Clinton’s delegation in March 1998. Mandela was President. Clinton was the first U.S president to visit South Africa in March 1998. He sought to enhance the relationship between the two countries, particularly in the areas of trade and development. He would be wondering what the heck was going on when Trump asked that the light be turned low for him to play video clips of a South African activist, Malema of the EFF party. His speeches are extreme.

It is equally important to note that In February 2025, a South African court ruled that claims of White genocide were “not real” and “clearly imagined.”

There’s no doubt that there are crimes and banditry attacks by some gangs against some White Afrikaner farmers and farmlands. To elevate those to genocides will make many serious, sensible students of history and victims of genocides revolt and convulse! Trump is off the zone of facts and realities of what is going on in South Africa’s continuing struggle for empowerment and access to the lands of their forefathers and heritage.

But as the unflappable Ramaphosa politely told President Trump, they have a multiparty democracy in South Africa where people express their opinion. Ramaphosa’s spokesperson, Vincent Magwenya, whom he appointed on June 1, 2022, was more frank. He told ABCNews that there “is no evidence of what’s being claimed here (by Trump’s White House). The U.S. has very sophisticated intelligence gathering mechanism. I can tell you now, if your intelligence community were willing to come out and speak, they’ll tell you that what is being propagated here is completely false.”

A few minutes after the “White genocide” fiasco at the Oval Office went down, the White House released a statement after the meeting titled “President Trump is Right About What’s Happening in South Africa.”

Genocide is much closer to the ideologies of hate and destruction of ethnic, religious and social groups. 

Somehow, they are trying clumsily to hijack the high ground of the continued and lingering issues which the apartheid overlords and masters of iniquities did to the Blacks!

Evidently, the folly of the failed and discredited Trump ambush still has not dawned on his foot-soldiers and communications team.