FALLING APART: There the president went again!

THURSDAY, MAY 22, 2025

David Brooks won't tell you: Yesterday, right there in the Oval Office, there they went again.

We refer to the gods of international ambush. They seem to control the soul of a badly disordered person. 

David Brooks won't tell you about it. Neither will anyone else.

Once again, the ambush came. In this morning's New York Times, the front-page report starts like this, principal headline included:

TRUMP BROADSIDE EMBROILS LEADER OF SOUTH AFRICA

In an astonishing confrontation in the Oval Office on Wednesday, President Trump lectured President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa with false claims about a genocide against white Afrikaner farmers, even dimming the lights to show what he said was video evidence of their persecution.

Yesterday's Oval Office event was "astonishing," the Times reports. Also, and just as it ever was, this latest astonishing event was driven by the sitting president's "false claims."

That's the way the Times reports it. Here's the corresponding news report from the Washington Post, principle headline included:

Trump confronts South African president, pushing claims of genocide

President Donald Trump pressed South African President Cyril Ramaphosa to protect White Afrikaner farmers from violent attacks in an extraordinary Oval Office confrontation Wednesday in which it fell to others to remind Trump of the nation’s long-standing epidemic of violence against both White and Black people.

Trump amplified false claims that White Afrikaners have been victims of a genocide, even showing video of crosses and earthen mounds that he said represented more than 1,000 grave sites of murdered farmers. The mounds were in fact part of a protest against the violence, not actual graves.

Tp the reporters at the Washington Post, the confrontation was "extraordinary." Like the Times, the Post is reporting that the sitting president's performance was built around "false claims."

At the Wall Street Journal, older journalistic conventions seemed to prevail. The president's claims were challenged in a more conventional way. Here's how it went over there:

South African Leader Pushes Back on Trump’s ‘Genocide’ Claims in Tense Meeting

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa came to Washington seeking what he called a reset in relations with the U.S. 

But his meeting with President Trump in the Oval Office on Wednesday devolved into a tense exchange over perceived threats to white farmers in South Africa.

Trump has made unsubstantiated claims that white South Africans were the victims of a possible genocide. During a lengthy back-and-forth in front of television cameras, he suggested Ramaphosa’s government wasn’t doing enough to protect them.

[...]

Although South Africa is one of the world’s most violent countries, Black people there are murdered at higher rates than whites. There is no evidence that murders of white farmers in the country amount to a genocide.

By paragraph 3, the Journal's reporters were saying that the president's principal claim was "unsubstantiated." By paragraph 6, they reported that "there is no evidence" in support of that principal claim.

So it went, across a range of major news orgs. As we type, this is the headline atop the report from the Associated Press:

Trump confronts South African leader with baseless claims of the systematic killing of white farmers

This is the headline from Reuters:

Trump confronts South Africa's Ramaphosa with false claims of white genocide

Baseless, false, unfounded, no evidence? So the reporting has gone.

Needless to say, it gets worse. The stumblebum nature of the president's conduct becomes more remarkable when a reader ventures inside these news reports. 

The New York Times joined the Washington Post and the BBC in reporting that Trump had mischaracterized a long line of white crosses "that he said represented more than 1,000 grave sites of murdered farmers." (See the Washington Post, above.) 

Whoops! That claim was false, all three news orgs said. According to Mediaite, the president also bungled by saying this:

Trump Holds Up Photo To Show South African ‘Genocide’–But It’s from Another Country

President Donald Trump held up a photo purporting to prove that a “genocide” is happening in South Africa, but the image is actually from the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

[...]

At one point, Trump held up a printout of a blog post from the far-right site American Thinker that was several months old. The post features a screenshot of a YouTube video of Red Cross workers responding to a mass rape and murder in the Goma, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

South Africa, Congo—what's the difference? The BBC joined Mediaite in reporting this factual bungle. 

This sort of misstatement is standard fare for this afflicted person—for the person David Brooks (and many others) refuse to be honest about. That said, the larger question here concerns the poisonous claim that a "genocide" is underway in South Africa—a genocide aimed at white farmers.

That was the principal claim in yesterday's poisonous ambush. "False, false, unsubstantiated, no evidence," these major news orgs say.

For the record, South Africa does have a major crime and homicide problem. To see Wikipedia's attempt at reporting "intentional homicide" rates for the world's nations, you can just click here.

South Africa's homicide rate ranks in that listing as fifth highest in the world. But "white people" are only 7 percent of that nation's population, and there is no apparent evidence that white farmers are being singled out for some sort of genocidal campaign. 

Is some such genocide occurring? What follows is drawn from a recent laborious fact-check by Politifact.com:

Trump’s Afrikaner refugee policy based on unfounded claims about land, white farmer ‘genocide’

[...]

We asked the State Department for evidence of a genocide of white farmers in South Africa, and a spokesperson said the department had nothing to announce regarding a genocide determination.

[...]

Experts rejected the “genocide” characterization of Afrikaners.

“There is no indication of a state-sponsored campaign or intent to eliminate a specific racial group,” [Anthony] Kaziboni said. “The primary motive remains robbery, sometimes coupled with extreme violence, consistent with broader patterns of violent crime in South Africa.”

The term genocide evokes the horrors of the Holocaust, which killed 6 million Jews, and the 1994 Rwandan genocide, where 800,000 Tutsis were systematically killed, Kaziboni said.

“Against this backdrop and the UN’s legal definition, labelling farm killings as genocide is both inaccurate and misleading,” Kaziboni said. “This does not diminish the severity of the violence or the need for enhanced rural safety, but it highlights the importance of responding with evidence, nuance, and context.”

It's a deeply inflammatory charge. Yesterday—what else is new?—it was tossed off in a spectacularly careless way.

That said, the truth about yesterday's ambush does get much, much worse. C-Span has posted a 17-minute chunk of videotape from yesterday's event beneath this anodyne headline:

President Trump and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa on Genocide

The videotape quickly features the gruesome screening of film the president staged in the Oval. At this site, we've long recommended against Blue America's use of its various verbal bombs, but the president's film screening was quickly dominated by otherwise pointless imagery which is all too plainly drawn from the world's overtly racist storehouse.

Those parts of the president's ambush film take us on an ugly trip below the level of moral squalor. Added to that was the president's fury when NBC's Peter Amexander dared to ask a couple of fairly obvious questions about a pair of fairly obvious topics. 

In his latest angry meltdown, the president staged a long angry attack on Alexander, calling him, among other things, an idiot and a jerk.

Is something wrong with President Trump? As we noted yesterday, an irony is lodged within that fairly obvious question:

By current wide agreement, the mainstream press corps took a dive in the last few years regarding the apparent cognitive decline of President Biden. But even as our journalists lash themselves for this alleged failure, they're now taking a dive regarding the rather obvious possibility that something of equal consequence may be wrong with President Trump.

They're averting their gaze from President Trump, as they did with President Biden.

For the record, what might be wrong with President Trump? Once again, here's what his niece, the trained clinical psychologist, said in her best-selling book:

None of the Trump siblings emerged unscathed from my grandfather’s sociopathy and my grandmother’s illnesses, both physical and psychological, but my uncle Donald and my father, Freddy, suffered more than the rest. In order to get a complete picture of Donald, his psychopathologies, and the meaning of his dysfunctional behavior, we need a thorough family history.

In the last three years, I’ve watched as countless pundits, armchair psychologists, and journalists have kept missing the mark, using phrases such as “malignant narcissism” and “narcissistic personality disorder” in an attempt to make sense of Donald’s often bizarre and self-defeating behavior. I have no problem calling Donald a narcissist—he meets all nine criteria as outlined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5)—but the label gets us only so far.

[...]

Does Donald have other symptoms we aren’t aware of? Are there other disorders that might have as much or more explanatory power? Maybe. A case could be made that he also meets the criteria for antisocial personality disorder, which in its most severe form is generally considered sociopathy but can also refer to chronic criminality, arrogance, and disregard for the rights of others...

The fact is, Donald’s pathologies are so complex and his behaviors so often inexplicable that coming up with an accurate and comprehensive diagnosis would require a full battery of psychological and neuropsychological tests that he’ll never sit for.

The fact that she said it doesn't mean that it's right. But what does this president have to do to rouse our stars—our extremely silent lambs—from their relentless refusal to report what they all are thinking?

Yesterday's Oval Office ambush was ugly all the way down. Is something wrong with President Trump? Is it possible that he could be diagnosed as "meet[ing] the criteria for antisocial personality disorder, which in its most severe form is generally considered sociopathy?"

Is it possible that he could be so diagnosed—that he could be so afflicted? And what does it actually mean if some such assessment is judged to be accurate?

We're entering difficult conceptual territory there. That said, that question has been out there for a long time, and the finer people at our finer new orgs are never going to go there.

They all believe that something is wrong, but none of them are willing to say so. The same thing they did with respect to President Biden's apparent cognitive decline they're now doing with respect to President Trump's apparent or possible "pathologies."

(Life is still good for the finer people. They don't want to fight with the Fox News Channel, and they don't want to fight with the various people surrounding President Trump.)

Yesterday's event was remarkably ugly, with an obvious racial component. It was also stunningly stupid and rude, but then, what else is new?

This was ugly stuff. Elsewhere, an angry tribe will support everything President Trump said and did. A silent secession has already occurred, and a secret and undeclared civil war is already well underway.

If something is wrong with President Trump, that represents a tragic loss of human potential. That said, yesterday's event speaks for itself, as have many events before it.

They didn't confront the question with Biden; they won't confront the lingering question with Trump. This is who and what we are, and nothing is going to change this.

David Brooks will never speak. In fairness, neither will anyone else. As things continue to fall apart, this is who and what we are, and this is all we have.

Tomorrow: Former "wrestler" speaks