Sometimes, diplomatic incidents can be boiled down to a clash of personalities or a minor misunderstanding. That’s not the case in what’s transpiring between the Trump administration and South Africa. On Friday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that South Africa’s envoy to Washington, Ebrahim Rasool, was “no longer welcome in our great country,” after the latter had delivered a speech virtually to a Johannesburg think tank where he cast the Trump administration as waging “a supremacist insurgency” against the West’s political establishment and pandering to an illusory “White victimhood” among its base.
Rubio described Rasool — a celebrated anti-apartheid activist and a veteran diplomat who had a previous stint in Washington under his belt — as “a race-baiting politician who hates America” and President Donald Trump, and declared him “persona non grata.” The following day, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa confirmed the expulsion, saying it was “regrettable” and urging all parties to “maintain the established diplomatic decorum in their engagement with the matter.”
Rasool’s rhetoric was conspicuous for a diplomat in station. But his remarks came after weeks of being frozen out by his interlocutors in Washington. According to a report in Semafor last week, Rasool had “failed to secure routine meetings with State Department officials and key Republican figures since Trump took office in January.” A South African diplomat told the news site that the cards were stacked against the ambassador: “A man named Ebrahim, who is Muslim, with a history of pro-Palestine politics, is not likely to do well in that job right now.”
The Trump administration’s animus is not just aimed at Rasool, but the whole South African government. The African nation’s stance on Israel’s war in Gaza — it has led the charge at the International Court of Justice, triggering a case investigating Israel for genocide — riled officials in both the Trump administration and its predecessor. Rubio represented this as “anti-Americanism” and skipped a foreign ministers meeting of the Group of 20 major economies bloc, which South Africa is chairing this year.
In Trumpworld, the enmity goes deeper. Online fearmongering among white nationalists has made its way into Trump’s talking points, with the president highlighting the supposed oppression of White farmers — principally ethnic Afrikaners, or the descendants of 17th-century Dutch colonists — and the perceived risk of violence they face, as well as the potential expropriation of their lands. Elon Musk, the South African-born tech oligarch working closely with Trump, has repeatedly invoked the far-right slogan of “White genocide” in the country, claims that a South African court recently declared were “not real.”
Musk is just one of a number of tech billionaires in Trump’s inner circle with ties to South Africa — others include PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and White House cryptocurrency adviser David Sacks — whose childhoods of relative privilege under the apartheid regime and dismay at the way the country has developed since the fall of apartheid may shadow their views of contemporary politics. Trump has turned sharply against South Africa in recent weeks.
“The move against the ambassador follows a series of Trump criticisms against the South African government, including an executive order last month denouncing new legislation that established a program for expropriation of unused agricultural land that White owners refused to sell to Black purchasers,” explained my colleague Karen DeYoung. “Trump ordered the cancellation of all U.S. assistance programs to South Africa and offered U.S. admission and resettlement ‘for Afrikaners in South Africa who are victims of unjust racial discrimination.’”
White people in South Africa are not more vulnerable to crime than any other racial group, according to police data. Though just 7 percent of the population, they own about half of the country’s land and are economically better off than other communities by most measures.
Some bemused onlookers think Trump and his allies are doing this for nativist supporters at home. “It plays into the fears of White people in America and elsewhere: ‘We Whites are threatened,’” Max du Preez, a White South African writer and historian, told the New York Times of Trump’s attacks on his country. “They’re playing on the thing of the White Christian civilization being threatened,” he added. “And that has a lot of appeal among the evangelicals and others in the United States.”
Patrick Gaspard, a former U.S. ambassador to South Africa, lamented the breakdown in the relationship and pointed to how the secretary of state was, as a political rival, far more critical of Trump than South Africa’s expelled ambassador. “We should note that Marco Rubio himself said far worse things about Donald Trump in the past than anything said by Ambassador Rasool,” Gaspard posted on social media. “Let’s be real about what these people are up to with their obsessive targeting of South Africa and their performance of grievance.”
In South Africa, Trump’s attention has had a rallying effect on an oft-fractured and fractious political scene. The administration’s move to cut assistance “has now pushed the most stridently pro-Western voices to the margins of society as the bulk of South African opinion, including among whites, moves toward opposing Trump’s actions,” Imraan Buccus, a senior research associate at South Africa’s Auwal Socio-Economic Research Institute, wrote in Foreign Policy. “Indeed, leading Afrikaner figures and organizations have made it clear that they prefer to remain in South Africa rather than to become refugees in the United States.”
Sarang Shidore, director of the Global South program at the Quincy Institute, a Washington-based think tank that urges foreign policy restraint, said the growing rift between the two countries predates Trump, with Biden officials irked with South Africa’s apparent indifference to Russian aggression in Ukraine even as it loudly championed the Palestinian cause. “Washington sees South Africa’s policy of nonalignment as a cover for a tilt toward U.S. rivals” in China and Russia, Shidore told me, adding that Trump has now added “a racial lens” to the relationship as he tries “to achieve escalation dominance against U.S. rivals at home and abroad.”
Trump officials have cast South Africa’s G-20 agenda as one based on “DEI,” or “diversity, equity, inclusion” — principles derided by the American right wing as leftist virtue-signaling and attacked by the Trump administration via executive order. U.S. critics of South Africa cast the postapartheid state as corrupt and failing, but others see the country’s fitful transformation from a white supremacist regime to a multicultural democracy as an unparalleled success story.
In his remarks last week, Rasool said South Africa was not “unique” in being targeted by an administration that is launching trade wars with allies and airstrikes on militant groups elsewhere. “But,” Rasool added, “we fit into that because we are the historical antidote to supremacism.”
