Serious blow to South Africa

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said South Africa’s ambassador to the US “is no longer welcome” in the country after the top envoy made comments about President Donald Trump, escalating a running feud between Washington and Pretoria.

Rubio made the announcement in a post on X, linking to a Breitbart News article on a lengthy conversation that Ambassador Ebrahim Rasool had with a think-tank in Johannesburg.

Rasool said that Trump and his Make America Great Again supporters are effectively a “supremacist” movement projecting “white victimhood.”

“Ebrahim Rasool is a race-baiting politician who hates America and hates @POTUS,” Rubio wrote, tagging Trump’s official X account. “We have nothing to discuss with him and so he is considered PERSONA NON GRATA.”

The South African embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to calls and emails seeking comment on Friday.

Declaring the diplomat persona non grata means the Trump administration will refuse to engage with him, which could force him to leave the country or spur his government to recall him.

The diplomatic episode is only the latest in a bitter, racially charged feud between the two countries, spurred in part by Trump’s South African-born billionaire adviser Elon Musk, who has spread the conspiracy theory of a “genocide” against South Africa’s White farmers.

That led to a White House executive order halting US foreign assistance to South Africa and declaring that the US refugee system would give priority to Afrikaner “victims of unjust racial discrimination.”

Ties between Washington and one of Africa’s largest economies had already been frayed after South Africa filed a case in the International Court of Justice accusing Israel, a top American ally, of committing genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, as well as the African nation’s ties with Russia, Iran and China.

In his comments, delivered in a lengthy conversation with the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection posted on Friday, Rasool referred to Vice President JD Vance’s meeting with a far-right German politician and Musk’s interventions in UK politics, saying Trump was “mobilizing a supremacism against the incumbency” at home and abroad.

The US has expelled diplomats before. In 1999, it accused a Russian diplomat of spying, labelled him ‘persona non grata’ and gave him 10 days to leave the country.

What Rasool said in the interview

Rasool’s comments were made to the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection where he accused US President Donald Trump of pushing a global white supremacist movement.

The ambassador’s comments came in the context of explaining the wild changes in US politics, where the Trump administration has made sweeping changes to government structures and taken an aggressive stance on former allies globally.

In the address, Rasool said that Trump and the so-called MAGA movement (Make America Great Again) were pursuing a “supremacist assault on incumbency”, saying that this was a “supremacist instinct” response to changing demographics in the USA and abroad.

Rasool said that the Trump administration’s focus on Afrikaners, for example, was to paint white people as being victims or embattled, which would serve as a “dog whistle” to mobilise a “global white base”.

“It’s almost that they are pitting a supremacist insurgency against the incumbency,” Rasool said, adding that it was an intra-party (Republican vs Republican), national and international “insurgency”.

“It’s forcing critical transitions in the world,” he said.

Rasool went on to say that Trump’s administration has broken all the previous rules of engagement and has taken a “shock and awe” approach to diplomacy, wielding the United States’ economic power to exert pressure through “punitive coercion” instead of “rules-based” duress.

“It’s hard impunity. In-your-face impunity,” he said.

Since taking office in late January 2025, President Trump has targeted the country, signing several executive orders focusing on local policies and stripping it of funding.

Trump took specific aim at South Africa’s land expropriation laws, which he falsely claimed were widely being used to seize land in the country.

He then invited white Afrikaner South African farmers to immigrate to America to escape oppression.

The US has also pulled funding from the country, including AIDS relief and withdrawing from agreements to fund green energy projects like the Just Energy Transition.

The Trump administration also sees South Africa as siding with its enemies and working against its national interests by supporting Hamas in the Israeli war.

{With Bloomberg)