South African Ambassador Embrahim Rasool told participants in a foreign policy seminar Friday that U.S. President Donald Trump is leading a white supremacist movement in America and around the world.
Rasool was addressing the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection (MISTRA) in Johannesburg in attempting to explain Trump’s recent foreign policy stances against South Africa’s property expropriation legislation and its alliances with Iran and Hamas, among others.
He said that white supremacism was motivating Trump’s “disrespect” for the “current hegemonic order” of the world, including institutions like the United Nations and the G-20.
He also said that the Make America Great Again movement was a white supremacist response to growing demographic diversity in the United States, and suggested that South African farmers who had presented Afrikaner grievances within the U.S. were part of that global effort.
Rasool explained (beginning at 18:58 in video below):
What Donald Trump is launching is an assault on incumbency, those who are in power, by mobilizing a supremacism against the incumbency, at home, and — I think I’ve illustrated — abroad as well. So in terms of that, the supremacist assault on incumbency, we see it in the domestic politics of the USA, the MAGA movement, the Make America Great Again movement, as a response not simply to a supremacist instinct, but to very clear data that shows great demographic shifts in the USA in which the voting electorate in the USA is projected to become 48% white. And that the possibility of a majority of minorities is looming on the horizon. And so that needs to be factored in, so that we understand some of the things that we think are instinctive, nativist, racist things, I think that there’s data that, for example, would support that, that would go to this wall being built, the deportation movement, et cetera et cetera. So I think I’d mention that. I think that there is also an export of the revolution. It’s no accident that Elon Musk has involved himself in UK politics, and elevated a Nigel Farage and the Reform movement, in much the same way that he was instructed that on his way to the Munich security summit, Vice President Vance addressed the Alternative für Deutschland [AfD] to strengthen them in their election campaign. And that, then, begins to say, what then was the role of Afrikaners in that whole makeup. And very clearly, it’s to project white victimhood as a dog whistle that there is a global protective movement that is beginning to envelop embattled white sommunities or apparently embattles white communities. It may not be true, it may not make sense, but that is not the dog whistle that is being heard in a global, white base. So I think we need to understand all of that. Another discontinuity — it’s almost that they are pitting a supremacist insurgency against the incumbency.
Rasool said that South Africa could lead the pushback to Trump’s white supremacism, since the country was “the historical antidote to supremacism.”
At the same time, he said that South Africa could encourage Trump’s “healthy disrespect” for global institutions that South Africa feels are dominated by the West, saying Trump’s stance was like “a broken clock being right twice a day.”
Rasool has a public history of supporting Hamas. He has struggled to gain traction in Washington, DC, according to Semafor, which noted that he is being “frozen out” by key players.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.