President Donald Trump warned South Africa that it will not be invited to next year’s G20 summit in Miami after what he perceived to be a snub against the United States.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa quickly clapped back, calling Trump’s salty social media post “regrettable.”
On Wednesday, Trump, 79, repeated his claim that a white “genocide” was taking place in South Africa, promoting a debunked right-wing conspiracy theory. He also said he was offended by a protocol dispute at the G20 summit held in Johannesburg last week.
The meeting was attended by leaders from Japan, China, Australia, France, South Korea, Canada, Brazil, Turkey, and other countries. But while the U.S. is usually present, Trump refused to attend or to send any White House officials to the event.
“It is a total disgrace that the G20 will be held in South Africa,” he wrote in a post on Nov. 7. “No U.S. Government Official will attend as long as these Human Rights abuses continue.”
In a G20 tradition, President Ramaphosa declared the event closed by banging a gavel on a block. The gavel is then traditionally handed over to the leader of the next country to hold the rotating presidency.
The White House instead attempted to send a staffer from its South African embassy to accept the gavel handover. However, South African officials felt handing the gavel to a junior diplomat was an insult and a breach of protocol.
Trump posted, “At the conclusion of the G20, South Africa refused to hand off the G20 Presidency to a Senior Representative from our U.S. Embassy, who attended the Closing Ceremony.”
He added, “Therefore, at my direction, South Africa will NOT be receiving an invitation to the 2026 G20, which will be hosted in the Great City of Miami, Florida next year. South Africa has demonstrated to the World they are not a country worthy of Membership anywhere, and we are going to stop all payments and subsidies to them, effective immediately.”
Ramaphosa posted a lengthy statement on X, saying, “As the United States was not present at the summit, instruments of the G20 Presidency were duly handed over to a US Embassy official at the Headquarters of South Africa’s Department of International Relations and Cooperation.”
He said while the U.S. was expected to participate in all the G20 meetings, it elected not to attend the summit in Johannesburg of its “own volition.”
The president added, “South Africa is a sovereign constitutional democratic country and does not appreciate insults from another country about its membership and worth in participating in global platforms.”
Ramaphosa said that South Africa would “never insult or demean another country or its standing and worthiness in the community of nations.”
His statement ended by noting it was “regrettable” that despite “numerous attempts” to reset South Africa’s diplomatic relationship with the U.S., “President Trump continues to apply punitive measures against South Africa based on misinformation and distortions about our country.”
In his Truth Social post, Trump claimed America’s absence from the G20 was because the South African government “refuses to acknowledge or address” Human Rights abuses endured by Afrikaners, and other descendants of Dutch, French, and German colonists.
“To put it more bluntly,” Trump said, “they are killing white people, and randomly allowing their farms to be taken from them.”
It is the latest move in the ongoing feud Trump has with South Africa over his claims they are discriminating against the white population of the country.
When Ramaphosa met with Trump at the White House in May, he played the president a video of what he claimed were the burial grounds of white farmers allegedly killed by Black South Africans trying to take their land.
Trump then confronted Ramaphosa with unsubstantiated claims that South Africa’s Black-led government is anti-white and perpetrating a “white genocide” against local farmers—while Elon Musk, the South African-born billionaire, stood on the sidelines of the Oval Office.
“Have they told you where that is, Mr. President?” Ramaphosa said in response to the claims. “I’d like to know where that is, because this I’ve never seen.”
Fact-checkers later established that the footage Trump played didn’t actually show the “burial sites” of “over a thousand” white farmers.
The white crosses on display had been temporarily erected as a memorial to a white farming couple shot dead on their premises in 2020.
Trump claimed the “Fake News Media” were not covering the “genocide.”
The post World Leader Lashes ‘Regrettable’ Trump Post After G20 Snub appeared first on The Daily Beast.
