President Donald Trump has hinted at his plans to bar South Africa from participating in the Group of 20 summit, which he plans to host at his Miami-area resort. He also declared that the United States will suspend all financial support to the country, citing the treatment of a U.S. representative at this year’s G20 meeting.
Trump had previously declined to send an American delegation to the Johannesburg summit, arguing that white Afrikaners were being violently targeted. South Africa has long rejected that allegation, calling it unfounded and inconsistent with its history of dismantling apartheid.
In a lengthy message on social media, Trump accused South Africa of refusing to transfer G20 hosting duties to a senior U.S. Embassy official at the end of the summit.
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“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,” Trump posted on Truth Social.
“South Africa has demonstrated to the World they are not a country worthy of Membership anywhere,” he added, “and we are going to stop all payments and subsidies to them, effective immediately.”
Trump has made the 2026 G20 summit a point of personal pride after confirming it will take place at his golf club in Doral, Florida.
The Johannesburg meeting, the first G20 gathering held on African soil, proceeded without the participation of the United States. Although the United States is a founding G20 member, the Trump administration chose not to sign the final declaration, criticizing South Africa’s priorities and arguing that climate issues were given too much prominence.
The United States assumed the rotating G20 presidency on Monday, leaving questions about how the previous summit’s outcomes will be treated under the new leadership.
Traditionally, the sitting host hands over a symbolic wooden gavel to the next presidency. Because the United States boycotted the meeting, there was no senior American official present to receive it from President Cyril Ramaphosa. The U.S. attempted to send a representative from its embassy, but South Africa objected, saying it would be disrespectful for Ramaphosa to hand the gavel to a junior official.
Trump has repeatedly asserted that white Afrikaner farmers are being killed and losing their land. The South African government, along with Afrikaner groups and independent researchers, has dismissed those claims as misinformation.
Since returning to office at the beginning of the year, Trump has increasingly tagged South Africa as hostile to American interests, pointing to its ties with China, Russia and Iran.
The administration has also changed U.S. refugee policy. Last month, it announced that only 7,500 refugees would be accepted annually, with most of the openings reserved for white South Africans. Trump suspended the refugee program on his first day in office in January, and only a small number of refugees have since been admitted, largely white South Africans. In May, the United States accepted a group of 59 white South Africans.
Afrikaners, descendants of Dutch, French and German settlers who arrived in the seventeenth century, occupy a complex place in the country’s history. Many were central to the apartheid system that governed South Africa from 1948 to 1994, while others opposed it from within. Today, an estimated 2.7 million Afrikaners reportedly live among South Africa’s population of about 62 million.
READ ALSO: South Africa’s Ramaphosa hits back as Trump pulls U.S. from G20, calling it ‘their loss’
