Footage shown during the meeting was also falsely portrayed as depicting “burial sites”.

“These are all white farmers that are being buried,” said Trump, holding up a printout of an article accompanied by a picture during the meeting with Ramaphosa.

Trump spreads fake news

The picture accompanying the article was in fact a screengrab of a video published by Reuters on 3 February and subsequently verified by the news agency’s fact-checking team showing humanitarian workers lifting body bags in the Congolese city of Goma.

The image was pulled from Reuters footage shot after deadly battles with Rwanda-backed M23 rebels, according to The Guardian.

The White House did not respond to a Reuters request for comment.

The meeting on Wednesday between Trump and Ramaphosa at the Oval Office in the White House started off with an amicable discussion.

However, the US president, who proved to be a political rottweiler for Afrikaners and white farmers, shifted the focus to farm attacks in South Africa.

Trump ambushed Ramaphosa by playing a video that he claimed proved genocide is being committed against white people in South Africa. In it was footage that Trump claimed showed the graves of more than 1 000 white farmers, marked by white crosses.

The footage was taken at a highway connecting Newcastle in KwaZulu-Natal southafrican province and, in fact, showed a memorial site, not graves.

Rob Hoatson, who set up the memorial to capture public attention, told the BBC it was not a burial site.

“It was a memorial. It was not a permanent memorial that was erected. It was a temporary memorial,” he said. The memorial was set up in the aftermath of the murder of two Afrikaner farmers in the local community. Hoatson said the crosses have since been taken down.

On Thursday, International Relations Minister Ronald Lamola said  South Africa had to take a “strategic decision” on whether it wanted the meeting between Ramaphosa and Trump to collapse on the basis of a “non-existing”  white genocide issue in the country.

Lamola said the “end goal” of the meeting was that the interaction must end with the “resetting of the bilateral relations”.

“We had to take a strategic decision whether we wanted the meeting to collapse on the basis of a non-existing issue or not. We wanted this matter, as you would have heard our president, that behind closed doors, these issues would be engaged on.

“There was indeed context provided with regards to the song (Kill the Boer). But it has got a historical context, it is not something that is sung now to incite any form of violence and so forth,” Lamola said.

Lamola added, “that (violence) is not government policy, to kill the Boer, to kill the farmer, he said.” The government policy is that South Africa belongs to all who live in it. It’s united in our diversity. But the constitution is also very clear that there must be transformation in our country”.