“Dead White farmers.”

If you watched the White House meeting between Donald Trump and South African president Cyril Ramaphosa, you already know what these words refer to. And if you didn’t, well, I’m frankly not sure that any amount of column inches can fully explain them.

On Wednesday, Ramaphosa and a South African delegation met with Trump in the Oval Office for what was supposed to be a relationship-building meeting between the two nations. It instead turned into what was, remarkably, only the second most offensive Oval Office ambush to take place between Trump and a foreign leader in calendar year 2025. (Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky’s appointment wins out merely because this time, Vice-President JD Vance was not present to deliver sucker punches.)

After the two leaders exchanged standard greetings and pleasantries, Ramaphosa made it clear that he had come to discuss mutually beneficial diplomatic policies. Trump made it clear that he had come to discuss dead White farmers. Trump cued an invisible aide (“Is Natalie here?”) to hit play on what he described as documentary footage. Television viewers couldn’t see what was on-screen, but we were led to believe that it contained, among other things, graves belonging to dead White farmers. “Executed,” Trump said.

“These are all White farmers that are being buried,” he stated with zero context or evidence. “The farmers are not Black,” he clarified later in the meeting, in case we had missed the point the first time, and also, “They happen to be White.” (The South African president delicately inquired as to the origin of the alleged footage, in the manner of a man who wants to call total bull, but does not want this meeting to become Zelensky Part 2).

I lost count of the number of times Trump repeated a variation of “dead White farmers”, but there was a certain point at which you knew you were watching a racist — excuse me, “racially tinged” — code phrase take shape. The kind of thing alt-right pundits are going to repeat on air and then act innocent and smug when you ask them to explain what exactly they are talking about. The kind of thing Trump insists is being ignored by the mainstream media — as he insisted multiple times on Wednesday — which, to be fair, it is. Because it does not exist.

I mean, is there a mass execution involving White farmers in South Africa? Ramaphosa, who is Black, suggested that Trump hear from other members of his delegation, including agriculture minister John Steenhuisen, who is White. Steenhuisen explained that ... You know what? We don’t even need to get into what he explained. Every South African who spoke in that meeting said a variation of the same thing: there is no genocide. There is only a country struggling with an incredibly tragic past informing a sometimes volatile present in which, yes, attacks on farms happen, but the victims of that violence are both White and Black. Or, as PolitiFact put it succinctly in a fact-check: “White farmers have been murdered in South Africa. But those murders account for less than 1 per cent of more than 27,000 annual murders nationwide.” Although killing for any reason is tragic, PolitiFact noted that most farm-related murders were owing to robberies, and not racially motivated.

In the Wednesday meeting, members of the South African delegation attempted to explain their country’s nuanced history to Trump — apartheid, Nelson Mandela, the articles of South Africa’s constitution. They attempted to explain that most White farmers don’t want to flee to the United States, as Trump implied, but to remain in their own country. None of it mattered. The particulars of South Africa’s equivalent of eminent domain don’t make a good rallying cry. You know what does? “Dead White farmers.”

Here, we could go in a lot of different directions. We could unpack the way Trump fawned attentively over the White male professional golfers whom Ramaphosa brought along, but scowled, appearing bored, through the testimony of Zingiswa Losi, the president of a group of trade unions, as she described horrific violence and rape perpetuated against South African women. We could note that Trump’s entire understanding of South African history and politics seemed to have been gleaned from a few Diet Cokes with Elon Musk, plus, I don’t know, maybe conversations with two randos from Johannesburg who once ate steaks at Mar-a-Lago and Ivanka Trump mentioning she had seen the movie Invictus.

But “dead White farmers” sticks in my brain because it is intended to. “I’m trying to save lives, no matter where!” Trump offered at one point, as though his preoccupation with a fictitious South African genocide was merely because of his well-known humanitarian impulses. But if that’s the case, why keep reminding us that the alleged victims are White? Why, after curtailing refugee programmes to the United States — folks from all over the world whose lives need saving — did the man decide the only worthy exceptions were 59 Afrikaners?

At one point in the meeting, Trump uttered the phrase “dead White people”, and then amended it to “dead White farmers”, which seems oddly specific until you wonder if their profession was also important for Trump to convey. It evokes the American heartland and the fear-based indebtedness he desires from all registered voters. Wisconsin farmers: you, too, require Trump’s protection.

“Dead White farmers” was a bizarre fixation in what should have been a serious meeting. In three words, he invented a genocide.

And then he spent the rest of the hour creating a different problem. Because every time he insisted that the mainstream media refused to cover the genocide of dead White farmers, he sowed more distrust in journalism. To the point that now, every time an article on the topic does not appear, that in itself will become evidence for this genocide that is not actually happening.

So if you came to this column because you Googled “dead White farmers”, here is your mainstream media coverage of the issue. I’m so sorry.

• Monica Hesse is an Opinion columnist who frequently writes about gender and its impact on society. In 2022, she was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in the field of commentary. She is the author of several novels, most recently They Went Left