During his Oval Office meeting with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa Wednesday, Donald Trump lashed out at the "fake news" for asking a question about white Afrikaners being granted refugee status in the United States over unsubstantiated claims of "genocide."
NBC's Peter Alexander was the first to ask, "Can you explain to Americans why it's appropriate to welcome white Afrikaners here when other refugees like Afghans, Venezuelans, Haitians have all had their protected status revoked?"
"Well, this is a group, NBC, that is truly fake news," Trump began. "They ask a lot of questions in a very pointed way. They're not questions, they're statements."
Trump continued, "We've had tremendous complaints about Africa, about other countries, too, from people. they say there's a lot of bad things going on in Africa. And that's what we're going to be discussing today.
When you say we don't take others, all you have to do is take a look at the southern border. We let 21 million people come through our border totally unchecked, totally unvetted. They came from all over the world."
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Trump repeated his claim that "they come from prisons, they come from mental institutions, they come from street gangs, and drug dealers."
"So don't say that we didn't take them. We take them. We're trying to get them out as fast as we can, and we're doing record business on that.
"But, we do have, a lot of a lot of people are very concerned with regard to South Africa. and that's really the purpose of the meeting, and we'll see how that turns out. But we have many people that feel they're being persecuted, and they're coming to the United States. And we take from many, many locations if we feel there's persecution or genocide going on. And we had a lot of people."
Trump then turned to President Ramaphosa, saying, "I must tell you, Mr. president, we have had a tremendous number of people, especially since they've seen this, generally, they're white farmers and they're fleeing South Africa. And it's a, you know, it's a very sad thing to see, but I hope we can have an explanation of that, because I know you don't want that. And it's, you know, it's a kind of a different meeting. Normally we have meetings, we talk about trade, and we'll be talking about trade and other things, but that certainly will be a subject that comes up."
Watch the clip below via CNN.
