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The White House strongly criticized a federal judge who found that the administration violated a court order by attempting to deport migrants to South Sudan.
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President Trump surprised a South African delegation with a video montage of apartheid-era chants from Mr. Malema.
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President Donald Trump staged an extraordinary confrontation in the Oval Office on Wednesday, repeating his false claims about a "white genocide" taking place in South Africa during a meeting with the country's president, Cyril Ramaphosa. At one point, Trump had the lights dimmed and ordered video clips played showing people calling for violence against white farmers in South Africa. The ambush was the latest in the administration's campaign to paint the South African government as racist against Afrikaners, the white minority that ruled the country during apartheid.
South African political economist Lebohang Pheko describes the Oval Office meeting as an "act of aggression" intended to shore up Trump's racist base. Trump "seems to have a great appetite for these spurious white supremacist ideologies [because] they mirror his own extremely skewed worldview," says Pheko.
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In a White House meeting, the U.S. president is expected to point to alleged discrimination against white South Africans, a week after welcoming a group of them as refugees.
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The Trump administration has suspended refugee resettlement for most of the world, but welcomed 59 white South African Afrikaners Monday who were granted refugee status. President Trump claims Afrikaners face racial discrimination — even though South Africa's white minority still own the vast majority of farmland decades after the end of apartheid — and claims they are escaping "genocide." This accusation "is a conspiracy theory and a myth that has been floating around echo chambers of right-wing populists and white nationalists for many decades now," says Andile Zulu, political essayist and researcher at the Alternative Information and Development Centre in Cape Town. We also speak with Herman Wasserman, a South African professor of journalism at Stellenbosch University, who says the Trump administration is using Afrikaners as "pawns, as props in a campaign that purports to promote whiteness."
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