Most readers undoubtedly remember the anger and incredulity last week when a Donald Trump tweet, launched in the pre-dawn hours, picked up the mantra of white farmer genocide from Fox News, courtesy of the Cato Institute, and then courtesy, in term, from AfriForum. Now the so-called "deep state" seems to have struck back, Foreign Policy magazine reports.

Like most people, this writer was flummoxed when he learned last week - from an insistent, early morning call from a television station - that US President Trump had picked up from a fact-light newscast on Fox News (courtesy of the writings of a staffer at the libertarian Cato Institute think tank and still earlier carryings-on by AfriForum) that white South African farmers were being slaughtered and their farms seized by the government, in a more southerly version of a Zimbabwe-wannabe, land confiscation campaign. In his tweet, the president had yet again demonstrated his signature-style, pompous, faux-grandiloquence, right down to instructing "his" Secretary of State to look closely into this dreadful mayhem, most...