South Africa hits back at 'punitive' Trump move to bar it from G20 meeting in Florida
Source: The Guardian
Thu 27 Nov 2025 04.50 EST
Last modified on Thu 27 Nov 2025 08.35 EST
Donald Trump has said that South Africa will not be invited to G20 events in the United States when it presides over the forum next year, a measure the African nation described as “punitive”. The US president repeated widely discredited claims that South Africa is “killing white people”, extending a diplomatic row between the countries after the US boycotted the summit in Johannesburg last weekend.
Trump posted on his Truth Social platform: “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. 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.”
Trump had already said in February he was stopping aid to South Africa, accusing the government of discriminating against white minority Afrikaners, who ruled the country during apartheid and remain on average many times wealthier than black South Africans, including inciting violence against white farmers and confiscating their land.
South Africa’s government and many of its citizens have repeatedly pushed back against these claims, noting that land expropriation is only allowed under limited circumstances and that South Africa’s high crime rate affects everyone in the country.
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/27/south-africa-hits-back-trump-move-g20-meeting-florida-2026
Back in 1993, on July 4, Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk were awarded the Liberty Medal by President Bill Clinton (during his first year of his first term in office) here in Philly, directly in front of Independence Hall.
Later that evening after that ceremony, Mandela had a rousing appearance at the Philly Civic Center (that venue is no longer around and was replaced with the PA Convention Center, where the buidling site was eventually taken over by the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHoP)).
Me and my mom managed to get floor seat tickets to that evening event and what a thrill! We had our little SA flags waving too!
Mandela's 1993 Liberty Medal speech is transcribed here (article from 20 years later after he passed) - https://www.phillymag.com/2013/12/05/nelson-mandela-philadelphia-liberty-medal-speech-1993-mandela-dead/
45 is working hard to bring apartheid back.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Link to tweet
-Despite the U.S’s absence, South Africa successfully secured a full Leaders’ Declaration, something Trump believed would collapse without American participation. When the time came for the handover of the Presidency, South Africa conducted it in a diplomatic, low-key manner appropriate to the situation, and the handover did in fact occur. What Trump is now angry about is not that the handover did not happen, but that it did not take place with the pomp and senior-level recognition he expected after snubbing the summit.
It is this sequence of self-inflicted diplomatic embarrassments: refusing to attend, changing his mind too late, being ignored by other world leaders, and seeing South Africa deliver a successful summit without him, that has now produced Trump’s tantrum and the absurd suggestion that he has the power to uninvite South Africa from the G20.
