The world recognizes Trump's racism, while U.S. media rarely call it out

The appalling Oval Office propaganda stunt inflicted on South African President Cyril Ramaphosa by Donald Trump on May 21, 2025 was whitewashed of its racism by the American press.

A premeditated racist stunt

Last week’s shocking but not surprising Oval Office attacks by Donald Trump on South African President Cyril Ramaphosa were filled with lies and unsubstantiated claims about a genocide against white farmers in South Africa. The premeditated multi-media made-for-viewing spectacle was appalling. Media outlets around the world reported on the startling display, many of them calling out the lies and misinformation, and some of them also the racism:

It was on the front page of newspapers from the UK’s Financial Times and The Daily Telegraph to Spain’s La Vanguardia, Italy’s Corriere Della Sera to South Africa’s Business Day, as well as The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal in the U.S.. However the framing of the American outlets was strikingly different from their foreign counterparts.

South Africa, a country of 63 million people, does have an extremely high homicide rate – with 26,232 murders committed in 2024, 42 per 100,000 people, among the highest in the world. The homicide rate is not, however, notably higher among farmers, and certainly not specifically so among white farmers. Only 44 murders were tied to farming communities, and eight of those 44 were white.

The so-called “law” Trump mentioned authorizing expropriation of lands from white people does not exist. He showed film of people purportedly calling to “kill the Boers;” only in reality, they were there to protest violence. At least one set of images were from Congo, not South Africa.

Editors outside the US saw racism and depravity, American Editors didn’t seem to

There is a clear framing difference in most of the international outlets, across numerous countries and including both left- and right-wing outlets. Almost all the international outlets called it an “ambush” or similar, stating that this was planned and not a sudden outburst by Trump. Some also clearly call it an attack and mention the lies in the headline, whereas the U.S. outlets are generally less direct, and some even framed it as if it was as much Ramaphosa’s fault as Trump’s.

Italy’s Corriere Della Sera: “Trump ambushes Ramaphosa with lies about ‘white genocide.’”

The Financial Times Editorial Board: “The entire optics of the event, in which Trump deferred to white golfers over a Black president and cabinet ministers, evoked nasty echoes of apartheid.”

Brazil’s O Globo on 1A: “Anti-Diplomatic Trap. With lies, Trump uses the Oval Office to ambush heads of state. This had already happened with the prime ministers of Canada and the United Kingdom and with the president of Ukraine, but yesterday Trump escalated his strategy of embarrassing heads of state in the White House. When receiving an official visit from his South African counterpart, Cyril Ramaphosa, the American resorted to lies to criticize a non-existent “genocide” against the white population in the country. Ramaphosa avoided turning the conversation into a fight.”

France’s Le Monde: “A trap. An unprecedented trap, with no way out, premeditated and blatant was sprung on South African President Cyril Ramaphosa on Wednesday, May 21. The setting was one of the world's most scrutinized stages for visitors: the Oval Office at the White House.”

Spain’s RTVE: “Trump accuses South Africa of “genocide” with fake images.”

While Trump is expediting the immigration of Afrikaners, white South Africans of Dutch descent, to the U.S., shortening background checks from the norm for refugees and asylees, his administration has stopped all other refugee processes, and has acted to overturn temporary protections to hundreds of thousands of migrants from war-torn and disaster-heavy countries, many of which are predominantly not white, such as Venezuelans and Haitians and Afghans. Numerous lawsuits allege US favoritism towards immigrants from mostly white nations/backgrounds, while he has said broadly that “immigrants are ‘poisoning the blood of our country.’” Elon Musk’s Grok AI recently spewed out responses about the spurious Great Replacement Theory and the nonexistent “white genocide in South Africa.”

Trump’s focus on “racism against white people”, and near-obsession with Afrikaners, while he works to re-segregate the U.S., as the Washington Post’s Karen Attiah describes it, is quite striking. Trump 2.0 is not just dismantling Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs; it’s rooting out diversity itself in a nod to the white supremacists. What else should you call it when the administration purges the Black Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Charles Q. Brown; and replaces him with a white retired Air Force Officer, Dan Caine, who did not even meet the qualifications for the job? Or when the government scrubs scientific research that includes words like “female,” “LGBTQ,” “diversity,” “Black,” and “Hispanic” (though not “white”)? Adam Serwer of The Atlantic describes the impact of Trump 2.0 policies as “The Great Resegregation.” The list of racist Trump statements and actions is extensive and public record.

Most major U.S. News organizations have a nasty tradition of whitewashing and normalizing racism

Many mainstream U.S. outlets seem reluctant to call out the racism, though some are beginning to do so more. Internationally, they are less hesitant to do so. In early February, Spain’s El País published a lengthy news article with the headline: “Racism in the Trump era – don’t speak that shit Spanish in my country” and sentences including “Donald Trump wants to transform the U.S. into a spa for white people” and “Trump and his Government continue determined to create a new internal enemy for Americans: the Latino migrant, which one must identify, signal and expel from the land.”

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“We Can No Longer Dismiss Trump’s Blatant Racism”.“Trump, who admitted no error, was not chastened and made no offers of assistance. His unacceptable behavior at the meeting can only be described as racist.” - Foreign Policy

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Meanwhile, many narrative-shaping U.S. media outlets and reporters, including the influential New York Times’ Maggie Haberman, who has long reported on Trump and who some call the “Trump whisperer,” continue to tap dance around direct questions of whether Trump is racist, such as in this revealing October 2022 interview with Nichole Wallace.

The same outlets and journalists who refuse to call a “lie” a “lie”, refuse to call “racism” “racism”. That undermines trust in journalism and enables, normalizes and whitewashes Trump’s racism.

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