President Donald Trump is set to meet with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa at the White House on Wednesday in a session that comes days after the Republican president accused the country of being “out of control” and committing genocide.
Trump repeated that claim last week as he winged it back to Washington from the Persian Gulf, asserting that white Afrikaner South Africans are being murdered and forced from their land, Fox News reported.
Some 60 white South Africans arrived in the United States last week, a move that prompted the Episcopal Church to pull the plug on its 40-year-old resettlement relationship with the federal government.
During an appearance on CBS News last weekend, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio underscored Trump’s claims, arguing that “all evidence [indicates] the farmers in South Africa are being treated brutally.”
“I would determine that these people are having their properties taken from them. You can- they can call it whatever they want, but these are people that, on the basis of their race, are having their properties taken away from them, and their lives being threatened and, in some cases, killed,” Rubio told “Face the Nation” host Margaret Brennan.
“These are people that applied and made these claims in their applications and seek to come to the United States in search of- of refuge,” Rubio continued, according to a transcript of the interview. “I- we’ve often been lectured by people all over the place about how the United States needs to continue to be a beacon for those who are oppressed abroad. Well, here’s an example where we’re doing that. So I don’t understand why people are criticizing it. I think people should be celebrating it, and I think people should be supporting it.”
Read More: Episcopalians tell Trump ‘nee’ to resettling white South Africans
It wasn’t immediately clear whether the session between Trump and Ramaphosa could devolve into the same kind of sharp-elbowed exchange between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskyy.
But don’t rule it out.
“The meeting is set to occur at a time when the relationship between the two countries has soured to unprecedented lows,” Frans Cronje, a Yorktown Foundation for Freedom advisory board member, told Fox News Digital.
