There is no white genocide in South Africa, but there has certainly been a mugging in the Oval Office. When Donald Trump forced his guest, South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa, to watch excruciating footage of hate speech and fake evidence of burial grounds of white farmers, he proved that no visitor to the White House is safe from the sort of ritualised humiliation infamously meted out to Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Leaders of other nations will have to think hard about whether it is worth seeking a once-coveted meeting in the Oval Office if the chances are that they are being set up for an ambush.

Trump’s parade of falsehoods was clearly directed at his Maga base. No one who knows South Africa could take seriously his portrayal of the country. It is a fact that violence is commonplace and that Afrikaner farmers are sometimes the victims. But to say this amounts to a genocide is a lie, one that wilfully ignores the fact that the South Africans who suffer disproportionately from violence are non-white.

For the neutral observer — and potential tourist or investor — South Africa’s reputation was ritually trashed in prime time. The entire optics of the event, in which Trump deferred to white golfers over a Black president and cabinet ministers, evoked nasty echoes of apartheid.