It was an ambush crafted straight from a reality-TV playbook. The Oval Office meeting with South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, started with exchanges of pleasantries, before Donald Trump said “turn the lights down” and a video was played to support his false claims that white South African farmers are being murdered for their race. Ramaphosa came prepared with champion white South African golfers Ernie Els and Retief Goosen, whom the golf-mad Trump referred to as “friends”, as well as South Africa’s richest person, Johann Rupert.Ramaphosa, who led the African National Congress (ANC) party’s delegation in the talks that ended apartheid white-minority rule three decades ago, needed to play his strongest cards.In February, Trump signed an executive order cutting aid to South Africa, accusing it of “unjust racial discrimination” against the white Afrikaner minority, which ruled the country during apartheid. The order criticised a South African law allowing land expropriation in limited circumstances and set up a program to bring Afrikaners to the US as refugees. The first group arrived earlier this month.