RISING TENSIONS
Last week, Trump further fuelled tensions, saying South Africa’s farmers were welcome to settle in the US after repeating his accusations that the government was “confiscating” land from white people.
Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that “any farmer (with family!) from South Africa, seeking to flee that country for reasons of safety, will be invited into the United States of America with a rapid pathway to citizenship”.
One of Trump’s closest allies is South African-born billionaire Elon Musk, who has accused South African President Cyril Ramaphosa and his government of having “openly racist ownership laws”.
Land ownership is a contentious issue in South Africa, with most farmland still owned by white people three decades after the end of apartheid and the government under pressure to implement reforms.
During a G20 event in South Africa last month, Ramaphosa said he had a “wonderful” call with Trump soon after the US leader took office in January.
But relations later “seemed to go a little bit off the rails”, he said.
In his X post, Rubio linked to an article from the conservative news outlet Breitbart, which addressed Rasool’s remarks via livestream to a foreign policy seminar on Friday.
“He said that white supremacism was motivating Trump’s ‘disrespect’ for the ‘current hegemonic order’ of the world,” Breitbart reported, adding that Rasool noted that Trump’s Make America Great Again movement “was a white supremacist response to growing demographic diversity in the United States”.
Rasool, an anti-apartheid campaigner in his youth, has expressed anger toward the Israeli government for its war in Gaza.
In February in an interview with news site Zeteo, he said what South Africans experienced during apartheid rule “is on steroids in Palestine”.
