Secretary of State Marco Rubio said South Africa’s ambassador to the United States is “no longer welcome” in the country.
“South Africa’s Ambassador to the United States is no longer welcome in our great country. Ebrahim Rasool is a race-baiting politician who hates America and hates @POTUS,” Rubio said.
“We have nothing to discuss with him and so he is considered PERSONA NON GRATA,” he added.
South Africa’s Ambassador to the United States is no longer welcome in our great country.
Ebrahim Rasool is a race-baiting politician who hates America and hates @POTUS.
We have nothing to discuss with him and so he is considered PERSONA NON GRATA.https://t.co/mnUnwGOQdx
— Secretary Marco Rubio (@SecRubio) March 14, 2025
Per Breitbart:
Rasool was addressing the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection (MISTRA) in Johannesburg in attempting to explain Trump’s recent foreign policy stances against South Africa’s property expropriation legislation and its alliances with Iran and Hamas, among others.
He said that white supremacism was motivating Trump’s “disrespect” for the “current hegemonic order” of the world, including institutions like the United Nations and the G-20.
He also said that the Make America Great Again movement was a white supremacist response to growing demographic diversity in the United States, and suggested that South African farmers who had presented Afrikaner grievances within the U.S. were part of that global effort.
WATCH:
Watch South Africa’s Ambassador Embrahim Rasool claim that President Donald Trump (and, later, Elon Musk) are leading a global white supremacist movement. Partial video and transcript below (more at the link):
“I think what Donald Trump is launching is an assault on incumbency,… pic.twitter.com/mF3Iwe14yo
— Joel Pollak (@joelpollak) March 14, 2025
Full text:
Watch South Africa’s Ambassador Embrahim Rasool claim that President Donald Trump (and, later, Elon Musk) are leading a global white supremacist movement. Partial video and transcript below (more at the link):
“I think what Donald Trump is launching is an assault on incumbency, those who are in power, by mobilizing a supremacism against the incumbency, at home, and — I think I’ve illustrated — abroad as well.
“So in terms of that, the supremacist assault on incumbency, we see it in the domestic politics of the USA, the MAGA movement, the Make America Great Again movement, as a response not simply to a supremacist instinct, but to very clear data that shows great demographic shifts in the USA in which the voting electorate in the USA is projected to become 48% white. And that the possibility of a majority of minorities is looming on the horizon.
“And so that needs to be factored in, so that we understand some of the things that we think are instinctive, nativist, racist things, I think that there’s data that, for example, would support that, that would go to this wall being built, the deportation movement, et cetera et cetera. So I think I’d mention that.”
Rubio declares South Africa’s ‘race-baiting’ ambassador ‘persona non grata’ https://t.co/Y2AtNe0VE2 pic.twitter.com/AmNaOjNGF4
— New York Post (@nypost) March 15, 2025
From the Associated Press:
Both Trump and his ally Elon Musk, who grew up in South Africa, have criticized the country’s Black-led government over a new land law they claim discriminates against white people.
It is highly unusual for the U.S. to expel a foreign ambassador, although lower-ranking diplomats are more frequently targeted with persona non grata status.
At the height of U.S.-Russia diplomatic expulsions during the Cold War and then again over Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, allegations of interference in the 2016 U.S. election and the 2018 poisoning of a former Russian intelligence officer in Britain, neither Washington nor Moscow saw fit to expel the respective ambassadors.
Phone calls to the South African Embassy seeking comment, made at the end of the work day, were not answered.
Rasool previously served as his country’s ambassador to the U.S. from 2010 to 2015 before returning to the post in January.
As a child, he and his family were evicted from a Cape Town neighborhood designated for white people. Rasool became an anti-apartheid campaigner, serving time in prison for his activism and identifying as a comrade of the country’s first post-apartheid president, Nelson Mandela. He later became a politician in Mandela’s African National Congress political party.