JOHANNESBURG, South Africa – United States President Donald Trump derailed a White House meeting on Iran to discuss a right-wing theory of a genocide against South African farmers, a new book claims.

Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton has published a new book, The Room Where it Happened, but he says the United States government’s prepublication review process prevented him from directly quoting the President.

For months, Bolton has been in a standoff with the Trump administration over the book’s contents, with demands that the book should not be released without the removal of certain details from the manuscript.

These include direct quotes of Trump which illustrate his naked politicisation of America’s foreign policy.

United States publication Vanity Fair reported on Thursday that it had obtained unredacted pages from the book, including comments that would anger the South African government.

Bolton describes how Trump derailed a White House meeting about Iran strategy by bringing up a right-wing conspiracy that black South Africans were killing white South African farmers and stealing their land.

According to Bolton, Trump blurted out that he wanted to grant the white South Africans “asylum and citizenship.”

Back in August 2018, South Africa accused Trump of seeking to sow division after his tweet referring to the “large-scale killing of farmers”.

He said he had asked his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to look into the matter of “seizing land from white farmers”.

South Africa’s presidency said Trump was “misinformed”, and the government said it would go ahead with plans to amend the constitution, allowing land to be expropriated without compensation.

The redistribution of land was a fundamental principle of the governing African National Congress (ANC) during its struggle against white-minority rule.

But 26 years after apartheid ended, white people – who make up just 9 percent of the population – own 72 percent of the farmland held by individuals, according to government figures.

Meanwhile, Vanity Fair reported that Trump had asked Chinese President Xi Jinping to “make sure I win”, ahead of the November election.

Trump allegedly told Xi during a dinner at the G20 conference in Osaka, Japan, last year: “I will probably win anyway, so don’t hurt my farms.… Buy a lot of soybeans and wheat and make sure we win.”

Bolton said Trump conducted foreign policy entirely for his own political benefit.

“I am hard pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my tenure that wasn’t driven by re-election calculations,” he wrote.

When the US and Chinese leaders met in Osaka last year, Trump stunned his team by asking Xi for help winning critical agricultural states, according to the book, scheduled for release on Tuesday.

Bolton wrote that Trump “stunningly turned the conversation to the coming US presidential election, alluding to China’s economic capability to affect the ongoing campaigns, pleading with Xi to buy more US agricultural produce to help him win re-election.”

Trump has slammed Bolton and urged his team to try to block publication. The Department of Justice on Wednesday filed for an emergency restraining order on publication. It requested a court hearing on Friday and asked that the injunction also bind Simon & Schuster, the publisher, and booksellers.

Simon & Schuster described the latest move by the justice department as a “frivolous, politically motivated exercise in futility” since hundreds of thousands of copies had already been distributed to booksellers.

As the Trump administration stepped up the pressure, John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence, said “unauthorised disclosures of classified information damage our national security”.

Bolton’s lawyer has accused the White House of deliberately stalling the process to prevent publication.