President Donald Trump is continuing his strange fight with the South African government. He already skipped this year’s G20 meeting in Johannesburg. Now he has announced that he will not invite any South African leaders to next year’s G20 in Miami. His administration even said that South Africa is “not a country worthy of membership anywhere.”
The whole drama did not actually start with Trump or South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa. It started with Elon Musk. After the pandemic, Musk wanted to expand Starlink, his satellite internet company, into South Africa. This matters to him because Starlink helps Tesla move toward fully self-driving cars. South Africa is one of the biggest car markets in the Global South, so it is valuable to Musk and his companies.
But there was a problem. South Africa has a law that says any telecom company operating in the country must have 30 percent local Black ownership. This rule exists because South Africa is still dealing with the deep inequality left behind by apartheid. The government uses policies like this to help the majority Black population gain more economic power.
Musk did not like this rule and called it a “racist ownership law.” He said this even though the United States itself has demanded similar business requirements from companies like TikTok. His argument did not hold up, but it still became a political talking point inside the Trump administration, which has been strongly against DEI programs.
Then things got even stranger. The Trump administration and its allies started pushing the false idea that South Africa is going through a “white genocide.” This claim has been disproven again and again. Still, the White House held a wild televised meeting where Trump showed Ramaphosa photos of mass graves in the Democratic Republic of Congo and claimed they were from South Africa. They were not.
Months later, nothing has quieted down. South Africa refuses to change its laws for Musk. Trump refuses to drop the pressure. And even though the administration keeps talking about genocide, the only “evidence” they ever showed was the set of misidentified images from Congo.
NBC reports that after Trump said he would not invite South Africa to the Miami summit, he posted on Truth Social. He wrote that the United States skipped the South Africa G20 because the South African government supposedly ignores “horrific human rights abuses” against white farmers. He again claimed they are “killing white people” and taking farms, even though these claims have no proof.
Next year’s G20 will take place at Trump National Doral in Miami, which is owned by the Trump family.