We know Donald Trump can put on a show, and that's exactly what he did in the Oval Office on Wednesday during his South African counterpart Cyril Ramaphosa's visit.
The meeting came just a week after more than 50 white Afrikaner South Africans arrived in the United States having been given refugee status, amid Donald Trump's repeated and fiercely disputed allegations that this community is facing "genocide".
Nineteen minutes into the press conference, a question came from the press pack: "Mr President, what would it take for you to be convinced that there is no white genocide in South Africa?"
While Mr Ramaphosa expressed a desire to discuss the issue around a "quiet table", it was clear Mr Trump had other ideas.
He called for someone to "turn the lights down" for what was clearly a pre-prepared presentation, first of video clips and then of printed news stories, assembled to support his contested claim of white farmer genocide in South Africa.
It was a headline grabbing manoeuvre that blindsided the South African president, but just what was in President Trump's show and tell?
Rows of crosses
"These are burial sites right here," Donald Trump said as a video played in the Oval Office showing white crosses lining each side of a rural road, with cars and agricultural vehicles parked alongside them.
"There is approximately 1,000 of them. They are all white farmers (and) the family of white farmers," Mr Trump said.
However, these crosses do not mark burial sites.
It was a member of the attending South African delegation who first struck on what they might be instead.
"They have a memorial to those who have died as a result of farm attacks," interjected John Steenhuisen, South Africa's Minister for Agriculture, and leader of the former opposition, now coalition government party, the Democratic Alliance (DA).
There have been a few of these initiatives, including the Witkruis Monument north of Pretoria on the N1 between Mokopane and Polokwane, which also uses white crosses to symbolise lives lost in farm attacks.
However, both the BBC and Reuters report that the crosses shown in Donald Trump's presentation date from 2020 when a community in KwaZulu-Natal province erected the crosses in protest at the murder of local couple, Glen and Vida Rafferty, who were killed on their farm.
The crosses were temporarily placed as a memorial to the couple and to all farmers who had been murdered in South Africa. They have since been removed.
The US president also presented a number of newspaper articles, which he said showed further proof of white South African farmers' persecution.
As he showed the articles to reporters, he held up one which contained an image of people lifting body bags and said: "These are all white farmers that are being buried".
However AFP, the BBC and Reuters have all confirmed that the image actually showed humanitarian workers burying bodies in the city of Goma in Democratic Republic of Congo in February.
A violent society or white genocide?
So, what about the veracity of Donald Trump's claim that white Afrikaner farmers are facing genocide in South Africa, which he repeated on Wednesday, saying "people in many cases are being executed and they happen to be white and most of them happen to be farmers".
This has been widely dismissed as untrue.
So what do the crime statistics say?
South Africa has one of the highest murder rates in the world.
Last year, 26,232 homicides were recorded by the South African Police Service (SAPS).
That's about 72 killings a day in a country of over 60 million people.
Most murder victims are black.
Of the more than 26,000 murders recorded last year, Reuters reports that 44 were linked to farming communities, that's 0.17%.
According to the SAPS figures, quoted by Reuters, of those 44 people murdered, eight were farmers.
Transvaal Agricultural Union of South Africa (TAU SA), a union of mainly Afrikaans farmers, collects its own data.
Statistics from the TAU SA, published by AFP in March, gave a lower figure for the number of people killed on farms last year, of 32.
However, it did give a higher figure for the number of farmers who died, of 17.
It also reported 43 farm murders in 2022 and 50 in 2023.
In total, TAU SA says that it has recorded 2,297 farm murders between 1 January 1990 and 31 January 2025.
It said that 1,455 victims were farmers, and the remaining deaths were of farm family members, farm workers and visitors.
Most farm workers are black.
In February, the High Court in Western Cape province dismissed a claim of white genocide as "clearly imagined and not real".
The message from the South African delegation was that there was no genocide in South Africa but that it was a "violent nation" and it needed help, including from the United States.
Zingiswa Losi, president of South Africa's largest trade union, urged President Trump to address the problem through trade and by creating employment.
Almost a third of adults were unemployed, 31.9%, in the last three months of 2024.
"The problem in South Africa, it is not necessarily about race, but it is about crime," Ms Losi said.
'Kill the Boer'
The US president's video presentation also showed multiple clips showing two now opposition party leaders singing different versions of Dubul’ Ibhunu, a song that was originally an anti-apartheid anthem.
The song emerged in the 1980s, amid opposition to more than three decades of apartheid rule, and the title translates to "Kill the Boer (an Afrikaner)", but it can be referred to as "Kill the white farmer".
"When you look at the videos, how does it get worse? These are people that are officials and they are saying ‘kill the white farmer and take their land’," President Trump said after showing the videos.
This contentious song has been the subject of multiple court cases in South Africa to determine if it constituted hate speech.
In 2011, a Johannesburg High Court judge found that it did but then an appeal to the Supreme Court of Appeal was withdrawn after the parties agreed to mediate.
That case was taken by the Afrikaner lobby group, AfriForum, against Julius Malema, who appeared in a number of the videos played as part of the Oval Office presentation.
Fast forward to 2020 and AfriForum took another civil case against Julius Malema for singing the same song, but this time the High Court dismissed the application.
Last year, South Africa's Supreme Court of Appeal upheld that decision finding that a "reasonably well-informed person would have some understanding of Dubul' ibhuna’s history in South Africa as a protest song linked to the liberation struggle.
"They would certainly understand that when protest songs are sung, even by politicians, the words are not meant to be understood literally, nor is the gesture of shooting to be understood as a call to arms or violence."
In March, South Africa's Constitutional Court refused to hear an appeal, saying it bore "no reasonable prospects of success".
Former South African president Jacob Zuma also featured in video clips shared by President Trump singing a version of Dubul’ Ibhunu.
It appears that that video dates from January 2012 when he was still president and leader of the ruling African National Congress (ANC).
At the time, the ANC was still defending the use of the song during AfriForum's case against then member Julius Malema, but later that year, as part of a mediated agreement around that case, the ANC agreed not to sing it anymore.
'Officials' or 'Opposition'
President Trump referred to the political figures seen in the videos as "officials", but as already mentioned, both are now opposition party leaders.
President Ramaphosa insisted: "What you saw, the speeches that were being made ... that is not government policy."
As well as showing Julius Malema singing Dubul’ Ibhunu, the clips also included a speech he gave in the South African parliament speaking about occupying land, another contentious issue which we'll return to.
Mr Ramaphosa described Mr Malema's party as "a small minority party" but one that "is allowed to exist in our constitution".
"We have a multi-party democracy in South Africa that allows people to express themselves," he said.
Mr Malema is a political personality that has loomed large in South African politics for over 15 years, but who remains on the opposition benches.
He was the leader of the ANC Youth League from 2008 until his expulsion from the party in 2012.
He went on to found and lead the left-wing populist Economic Freedom Fighters of South Africa (EFF), who up until the 2024 general election were South Africa's third biggest party, when they won 9.5% of the vote, down from 11% in 2019.
The spot of third largest party then went to a new party led by a familiar face, uMkhonto weSizwe or MK, led by former ANC leader and president Jacob Zuma.
Just seven months after registering as a political party, it claimed 14.6% of the vote, eating into support for both the ruling ANC and the Julius Malema's EFF.
The 2024 election saw the ANC loose a majority for the first time in 30 years, leading it to go into "government of national unity" with long-time opposition party the pro-business Democratic Alliance (DA) and two smaller parties.
The DA has long had an image of being predominantly a wealthy white party.
Its leader, the now Minister for Agriculture John Steenhuisen, told Donald Trump that the reason his party went into government with the ANC "was precisely to keep" Julius Malema and Jacob Zuma "out of power".
Land expropriation
A bone of contention between the US and South Africa, but also among the current coalition partner parties in South Africa, has become the issue of land expropriation without compensation, which was brought to a head in January with the signing into law of a new Act that would allow it in certain limited circumstances.
In the Oval Office, Donald Trump put it to Cyril Ramaphosa that he had "laws that were passed that give you the right to confiscate land for no payment".
The Expropriation Act does allow for land to be appropriated by the state without compensation, but only where it is deemed "just and equitable and in the public interest" to do so.
It can also only be done in certain circumstances, for example if the land is not being used, is being held for speculative purposes, or if it poses a risk to people.
The law also requires authorities to first try to reach an agreement with the land owner, and no land has been expropriated yet as a result of this new legislation.
The ANC has long promised land reform and redistribution to address inequality, with the majority of farmland, more than 70%, owned by white farmers more than 30 years after the end of apartheid rule.
The EFF, for whom land appropriation without compensation is a core demand, was among the parties who voted against the legislation, as it believes it does not go far enough.
However, ANC government partner the DA has also criticised the new law, saying it threatens property rights and it is challenging it in South Africa's Constitutional Court.
Speaking in the Oval Office, President Ramaphosa said that "the constitution guarantees and protects the sanctity and tenure of land ownership and that constitution protects all South Africans with regard to land ownership".
However, he said that the government "had to deal with the past" and that it had the right "to appropriate land for public use".
He also made reference to the fact that Mr Trump’s government "also has that right".
A report by the United States Government Accountability Office in 2020 set out that Donald Trump's first administration compulsorily seized some of the land used to build the wall on the Mexico border, but that some compensation was given to land owners.
The Elon Musk Factor and Starlink in South Africa
South African tech billionaire and ally and adviser to Donald Trump Elon Musk was present at the press conference in the Oval Office on Wednesday.
Mr Trump mentioned Mr Musk as one of his "South African friends" but joked that he would much prefer to discuss "sending rockets to Mars".
Nevertheless, its notable that many of the videos that made it into President Trump's montage were clips re-posted by Mr Musk in recent months.
They include a video of Julius Malema singing "Kill the Boer" at a political rally in a football stadium in Soweto.
In July of last year, Mr Musk responded to this video, saying it was "openly pushing for the genocide of white people in South Africa".
The video of the 2020 memorial of white crosses erected in protest at farm deaths was also re-posted by Mr Musk just earlier this month on his platform X.
The tech billionaire has also criticised the Expropriation Act, asking in March: "Where is the outrage?"
That same month he also alleged that his satellite internet service provider Starlink was "not allowed to operate in South Africa simply because I'm not black".
The BBC reported at the time that the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa) had said that Starlink had never submitted an application for a licence.
However, it is the case that South African law requires investors to give local black firms a 30% stake in their businesses in South Africa, as part of "black empowerment" policies to tackle racial injustices of the past.
Such policies are a core pillar of the ANC after the end of Apartheid rule in 1994, but are very much at odds with the Trump administration's abhorrence of all things "diversity and inclusion".
Ahead of Wednesday's meeting, Bloomberg was reporting that South Africa’s government planned to offer Mr Musk "a workaround" to these black ownership laws that would allow Starlink to operate in the country.
There's been no word on that since, but the use of Starlink tech was raised by the South African delegation when discussing possible solutions to South Africa's crime problem.
This was spelled out by another South African billionaire Johann Rupert.
"We have too many deaths … it’s not only white farmers; it’s across the board," Mr Rupert said.
"We need technological help, we need Starlink at every little police station, we need drones … we need your help to stop these awful killings."
Watch this space.
