Donald Trump lackey and Secretary of State Marco Rubio has expelled Emrahim Rasool, South Africa’s ambassador to the United States, the Associated Press reported. The foreign diplomat lost his diplomatic privileges and immunity on Monday and must leave the country by Friday. His transgression: not being sufficiently pro-Trump.
“South Africa’s Ambassador to the United States is no longer welcome in our great country. 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 wrote in a Friday post on X that reads more like a screed Donald Trump would write on his Truth Social platform.
In the X post, Rubio linked to an article from the right-wing white supremacist outlet Breitbart, which said that Rasool gave a speech in which he criticized Trump, the Make America Great Again movement, and co-President Elon Musk.
Rasool said that the MAGA movement is a response “not simply to a supremacist instinct,” but a reaction to changing demographics in the United States, “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.”
“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 it was instructive that on his way to the Munich security summit, Vice President Vance addressed the [far-right party] Alternative für Deutschland to strengthen them in their election campaign,” Rasool added. “And that, then, begins to say, what was the role then 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 communities or apparently embattled white communities.”
Those comments are apparently what prompted Rubio’s bombastic social media post.
“We made the embassy aware that Ambassador Rasool has been found unacceptable by the United States to be a representative of his country,” the State Department said in a statement to the Associated Press.
This is the latest spat between the United States and South Africa since Trump took office.
In February, Rubio announced he was skipping the G20 summit of world leaders in Johannesburg because he said South Africa supports “DEI and climate change” and that his “job is to advance America’s national interests, not waste taxpayer money or coddle anti-Americanism.”
In that announcement, Rubio also parroted Trump’s lie that South Africa is “confiscating land” from white Afrikaners, the descendants of the white Dutch settlers who are responsible for South Africa’s racist apartheid government.
That same month, Trump cut off funding to South Africa and prioritized accepting Afrikaners as refugees to the United States, accusing the current Black-majority South African government of “seize[ing] ethnic minority Afrikaners’ agricultural property without compensation.”
“South Africa is confiscating land, and treating certain classes of people VERY BADLY,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post in February. “The United States won’t stand for it, we will act. Also, I will be cutting off all future funding to South Africa until a full investigation of this situation has been completed!”
The Trump administration’s targeting of South Africa coincides with Musk’s outsized role in the United States government—and that’s no actual coincidence.
Musk is a South African who espouses white supremacist views and even makes Nazi salutes. The multibillionaire owner of X has been in Trump’s ear since his successful 2024 election campaign, which Musk helped bankroll with more than $277 million.
On Monday, State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce claimed that Rasool’s expulsion had nothing to do with his Trump criticism.
“It’s not about criticism. This was the equation of the president and the country with white supremacy,” Bruce said at a news conference. “It was an allegation that casts such an awful light on the nature of the country, on individuals. It is, if we don’t have a standard on the nature of someone who is in this country who is supposed to be a diplomat to help facilitate the relationship between two countries, and that this is the standard of it, you know we deserve better.”
Maybe—and hear us out here—if Trump and his supporters didn’t espouse white supremacist views, they wouldn’t have their feelings hurt when people rightly point out their racism.
