And With Those Comments, Rubio Declares South Africa's Ambassador to US 'Persona Non Grata'

Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Friday declared Ebrahim Rasool, South Africa’s Ambassador to the U.S., “persona non grata” after his comments about President Donald Trump.

“South Africa’s Ambassador to the United States is no longer welcome in our great country,” Rubio said in a Friday post on the social platform X. “Emrahim Rasool is a race-baiting politician who hates America and hates @POTUS. We have nothing to discuss with him and so he is considered PERSONA NON GRATA.”

Rubio shared a link to a Breitbart report detailing Rasool’s comments, which were made during an event at a think tank in Johannesburg, South Africa.

South African Ambassador Embrahim Rasool told participants in a foreign policy seminar Friday that U.S. President Donald Trump is leading a white supremacist movement in America and around the world.
Rasool was addressing the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection (MISTRA) in Johannesburg in attempting to explain Trump’s recent foreign policy stances against South Africa’s property expropriation legislation and its alliances with Iran and Hamas, among others.
He said that white supremacism was motivating Trump’s “disrespect” for the “current hegemonic order” of the world, including institutions like the United Nations and the G-20.
He also said that the Make America Great Again movement was a white supremacist response to growing demographic diversity in the United States, and suggested that South African farmers who had presented Afrikaner grievances within the U.S. were part of that global effort. (Breitbart)

Sending Rasool to DC was emblematic of @MYANC's obtuseness in believing that it can continue with its anti-American hostility without consequences. That was the situation for decades, but now it has changed. https://t.co/hnuMdEZ6Cq pic.twitter.com/lOrXX0liHR
— Joshua Meservey (@JMeservey) March 14, 2025

Rasool's full comments are below, via Breitbart:

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.