Rubio says South Africa envoy is 'persona non grata,' fueling feud

Iain Marlow, Bloomberg News on Mar 14, 2025

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WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Marco Rubio said South Africa’s ambassador to the U.S. “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 an email for comment on Friday. Declaring the diplomat persona non grata means the Trump administration will refuse to engage with him, and it 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 U.S. foreign assistance to South Africa and declaring that the U.S. 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, committing a 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 U.K. politics, saying Trump was “mobilizing a supremacism against the incumbency” at home and abroad.

The U.S. has expelled diplomats before. In 1999, it accused a Russian diplomat of spying, labeled him "persona non grata" and gave him 10 days to leave the country.

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