’60 Minutes’ Finally Airs Explosive Anderson Cooper Report Debunking Major Trump Claim

Anderson Cooper debunked President Donald Trump‘s claims of a “genocide” of white South African farmers on Sunday’s (February 22) edition of 60 Minutes.

The report, which The Daily Beast says was previously delayed by new CBS News boss Bari Weiss and subjected to an “abnormal” editing process, aired on Sunday’s show and saw Cooper traveling to South Africa to investigate Trump’s claims.

In the segment, Cooper played a clip of the president speaking to reporters in May 2025, in which he said, “It’s a genocide that’s taking place that you people don’t want to write about. It’s a terrible thing that’s taking place and farmers are being killed. They happen to be white.”

Trump repeated these claims a week later when South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa visited the White House. The president showed Ramaphosa video “proof” of what he said were “Burial sites. Over 1,000… of white farmers.” The video featured a row lined with several white crosses.

Cooper spoke with the man who erected those crosses, Darrel Brown, who said, “It definitely wasn’t a burial site. I mean those crosses were there for less than 48 hours. It was purely an avenue of crosses we planted there in honor of commercial farmers in South Africa that had lost their lives.”

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Brown, who keeps the crosses in a shed, said he put the crosses back up in 2024 for the funeral of his best friend, Tollie Nel, who was murdered on his farm.

Cooper also spoke with Tollie’s widow, Rene Nel, and asked her whether she would consider what is happening on South African farms to be a “genocide.”

“Not what I know as a genocide,” she said. “Not what I’ve heard of what a genocide is. I see our attack as an opportunistic attack. They knew there was money. They knew there were firearms.”

Johann Kotzé, the head of South Africa’s largest agricultural organization, also denied Trump’s claims. “It’s actually not about white genocide,” he stated. “It’s about criminality in South Africa. It’s crime. The fact that it happened on a farm doesn’t make me special as a farmer. It’s horrendous. Any murder is horrendous.”

The report comes just days after Cooper announced he will be leaving 60 Minutes at the end of the current broadcast season. He will continue to host Anderson Cooper 360 on CNN.