Trump Administration Kicks South African Ambassador Out of the U.S. After Breitbart News Report: ‘Persona Non Grata’
The Trump administration has ejected South African Ambassador Ebrahim Rasool out of the country, declaring him persona non grata after he gave a lecture claiming that President Donald Trump is a white supremacist leader.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced Rasool’s expulsion via X on Friday afternoon:
Rubio linked to a Breitbart News article that reported on a lecture Rasool had given Friday morning to a South African think tank, in which he had claimed that Trump was leading a global white supremacist movement.
Rasool said, in part:
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. I think that there is also an export of the revolution. It’s no accident that Elon Musk has involved himself in UK politics, and elevated a Nigel Farage and the Reform movement, in much the same way that he was instructed that on his way to the Munich security summit, Vice President Vance addressed the Alternative für Deutschland [AfD] to strengthen them in their election campaign. And that, then, begins to say, what then was the role of Afrikaners in that whole makeup. And very clearly, it’s to project white victimhood as a dog whistle that there is a global protective movement that is beginning to envelop embattled white sommunities or apparently embattles white communities. It may not be true, it may not make sense, but that is not the dog whistle that is being heard in a global, white base. So I think we need to understand all of that. Another discontinuity — it’s almost that they are pitting a supremacist insurgency against the incumbency.
Rasool also had a history of supporting Hamas, which reportedly led American officials to avoid meetings with him.
Rasool’s ejection is the latest chapter in a confrontation between South Africa and the U.S. over South Africa’s expropriation laws and its alliance with hostile regimes such as Chin and Iran. South Africa equivocated on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and led international efforts to isolate Israel after the Hamas terror attack of October 7, 2023.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa also wrote an op-ed attacking President Trump over his decision to restore sanctions against the International Criminal Court (ICC), which Trump had targeted during his first term after its staff began preparing, without jurisdiction, to prosecute U.S. soldiers for alleged war crimes in Afghanistan.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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