Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Friday declared Ebrahim Rasool, South Africa’s ambassador to the United States, persona non grata, saying “he is no longer welcome in our great country.”
Calling Rasool “a race-baiting politician who hates America and hates @POTUS,” referring to President Donald Trump, Rubio said in a social media post that “we have nothing to discuss with him.”
The immediate cause of Rubio’s ire appeared to be a speech Rasool delivered virtually to a Johannesburg think tank Friday in which he said Trump was “mobilizing” white supremacy in the United States and “abroad as well,” according to a Breitbart News article cited by Rubio’s post.
Rasool made particular mention of Vice President JD Vance’s support for Germany’s right-wing Alternative for Germany political party, and the prominence within the Trump administration of Elon Musk, a White South African who has also supported conservative political movements in other countries.
In his post on X, the Musk-owned social media site, Rubio repeated Breitbart’s misspelling of Rasool’s first name, which he corrected in a subsequent post.
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. 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.”
Afrikaners are an ethnic group descended from predominantly Dutch settlers who arrived in South Africa in the 17th century. Beginning in the late 1940s, the ruling minority Afrikaner political party enacted white supremacist racial laws, known as apartheid, against the Black majority population. The U.S. government levied economic sanctions in the 1980s against the Afrikaner-led government, which ultimately helped to end South Africa’s racist regime with the country’s first multiracial election in 1994.
Since that time, the country has been ruled by the electorally dominant African National Congress party, which rode to victory led by Nelson Mandela.
Rasool was not immediately reachable, and it was not clear whether he was in Washington when he delivered the virtual address.
In a statement issued Saturday, the office of South African President Cyril Ramaphosa noted “the regrettable expulsion” of Rasool.
“The Presidency urges all relevant and impacted stakeholders to maintain the established diplomatic decorum in their engagement with the matter,” the statement said. “South Africa remains committed to building a mutually beneficial relationship with the United States.”
Rasool’s remarks, made at a policy seminar at the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection in Johannesburg, dealt with South African relations with the new Trump administration. “How South Africa responds to the current relations with the U.S. demands a lot of perspective from us,” he said, according to a video of the event.
“For example, in terms of continuities inherited from previous U.S. administration, the Joe Biden administration started discussions for South Africa to be removed from the duty-free access framework African Growth and Opportunity Act, owing to some of our geopolitical stances,” Rasool said.
Those stances, he said, included Washington’s “disenchantment” with South Africa’s charges of Israeli genocide in Gaza in the International Court of Justice. He advised South Africans to “stay calm and don’t panic” as cooperation with the United States frayed. South Africa was not “unique” in being targeted by the administration, Rasool said, “but we fit into that because we are the historical antidote to supremacism.”
Rubio declined to attend a meeting of the G-20 hosted last month by South Africa, saying it was using the multinational body to promote “DEI and climate change.”
“My job is to advance America’s national interests, not waste taxpayer money or coddle anti-Americanism,” Rubio said.
Rasool presented his credentials as ambassador to President Joe Biden just days before Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration. He had served previously in the same Washington post from 2010 to 2015. He has also served as premier of the Western Cape province and a member of the National Assembly.
