South Africa's ambassador made 'unacceptable' comments, US says

Eric Martin, Bloomberg News on Mar 17, 2025

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Comments from South Africa’s ambassador about the Trump administration were “unacceptable” and “obscene,” State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce said Monday, providing further explanation why the envoy is no longer welcome in Washington.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared Ambassador Ebrahim Rasool “persona non grata” on Friday after the diplomat said that Trump and his supporters are effectively a “supremacist” movement projecting “white victimhood.”

“These remarks were unacceptable to the United States,” Bruce said in a briefing. “Not just to the president, but to every American. They were pretty much obscene when it came to the nature of what was alleged.”

Rasool is expected to leave the U.S. by Friday, Bruce said, one week after State Department staff met with South African diplomats to communicate their decision.

Bruce said Rasool’s comments came on top of other positions by the South African government that the White House finds problematic. Those include land laws Trump and Rubio allege are unjust toward white South African farmers, a “growing relationship” with Russia and Iran, and bringing accusations of genocide against Israel at the International Court of Justice.

The racially charged feud between the two countries was partly spurred 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.

Trump has signed an executive order halting U.S. foreign assistance to South Africa and declared that the U.S. refugee system would give priority to Afrikaner “victims of unjust racial discrimination.”

The Trump administration has claimed South Africa is expropriating their land, although authorities have not confiscated any private land since the end of apartheid in 1994.

Rubio’s declaration on Rasool came after his comments, made during a lengthy virtual event with a think-tank in Johannesburg, were reported by Breitbart News last week.

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