by Daniel Johnson
March 16, 2025
Rubio declared Ebrahim Rasool is persona non grata.
The Trump administration’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared in a social media post on March 14 that South African Ambassador Ebrahim Rasool is considered persona non grata by the Trump administration, and as such is no longer welcome in the United States, after Rasool dared to tell the truth about Donald Trump’s rise in American politics.
According to Al-Jazeera, Rubio wrote in his post on social media that he, and by virtue of his position, the Trump administration, considers Rasool unwelcome in the United States.
“Ebrahim Rasool is a race-baiting politician who hates America and hates POTUS,” Rubio wrote, referring to Trump. “We have nothing to discuss with him and so he is considered PERSONA NON GRATA.”
Rubio attached his sentiments to a link from far-right news source Breitbart, which quotes Rasool as saying that Trump was able to tap into a white “supremacist instinct” and “white victimhood” and described those terms as a “dog whistle” for racists during the 2024 election.
According to NPR, Rasool delivered remarks in a seminar hosted by a South African think tank, his remarks followed widely accepted ideas about the motivations and fears of white supremacists, and his remarks indicated that the MAGA political movement is part of a wider movement towards extremist political parties globally.
“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,” Rasool said in the seminar.
The South African government responded to the expulsion of its ambassador with a statement emphasizing its desire to maintain a good relationship with the United States of America.
Vincent Magwenya, the spokesman for the South African President Cyril Ramaphosa called the decision “regrettable” before urging a commitment to decorum.
“We urge all relevant and impacted stakeholders to maintain the established diplomatic decorum in their engagement with the matter,” Magwenya said. “South Africa remains committed to building a mutually beneficial relationship with the United States of America.”
South Africa has been a frequent target of Trump’s false representations concerning the country’s plans to deal with the inequality regarding its commercial farmland, which is in line with the substance of Rasool’s comments about what led to MAGA’s rise in American politics.
Although Trump indicated that white farmers in South Africa are having their land taken and invited them to settle in the United States as refugees, the majority of South African commercial farmland is controlled by South Africa’s minority white populace.
This was described by the South African government as an exercise in irony as they declared it “ironic that the executive order makes provision for refugee status in the US for a group in South Africa that remains amongst the most economically privileged.”
The South African government is governed by the African National Congress (ANC) which emerged post-apartheid, and was intended to help the country heal the scars of its oppressive rule by the country’s white minority population.
Although Trump appears to believe that white South Africans are an oppressed group, South African authorities have indicated that the country still bears the scars of apartheid through continued levels of inequality between its minority-white population and its majority-Black population.
Of note, Rasool and his family were expelled from their homes in Cape Town during South Africa’s apartheid period when Black residents were rounded up and forcibly relocated to designated areas for non-white citizens with nearly zero resources or economic opportunities, similar to how the United States of America treated its own indigenous peoples during the Trail of Tears.
According to Nicky Falkof, a professor at the University of the Witwatersrand, the idea that white South Africans are oppressed and the idea that white people are perpetual victims are part and parcel of the white victimhood, which Rasool criticized in his seminar.
“The architecture of white supremacy depends on the idea that white people are extraordinary victims. This is the driving notion beneath the great replacement theory, a far-right conspiracy theory claiming that Jews and non-white foreigners are plotting to “replace” whites. It also underpins violent reactions to the global migration crisis and the rise of populism in the north’” Falkof wrote for The Conversation in a February op-ed.
She continued, “I don’t think it’s going too far to say that whiteness as a social construction is intrinsically tied to victimhood. The idea that whiteness actually makes people more rather than less vulnerable is likely to remain a central part of white people’s collective psychic imaginary for some time.”
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