Trump disinvites South Africa from 2026 G20 summit

President Donald Trump will not invite South Africa to next year’s G20 summit in Miami, he said Wednesday on social media, a snub that escalates his rebukes against the country for its alleged discrimination of its white population.

U.S. officials boycotted this month’s G20 talks — an annual meeting of world leaders to discuss global economic development, hosted this year in Johannesburg, South Africa — as Trump has decried the host country’s treatment of its white citizens as a “genocide.”

At the end of the summit, the White House attempted to send a representative from its South African embassy instead of Trump to accept a gavel handover from South Africa, as the host country customarily closes the meeting by handing a gavel to the leader of the next country presiding over the summit. But South Africa rejected the gesture as an insult and a breach of protocol, prompting Trump to withhold the country’s invitation to his Miami property for next year’s meeting.

“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 wrote on Truth Social. “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.”

The disinvitation adds another layer of tension to an already mired relationship between the two nations as Trump continues to deplore South Africa for what he says is ongoing persecution of South Africa’s white farmers.

The administration granted refugee status to dozens of white South Africans in May, even as it slashed the number of refugees coming to the U.S. from other countries. South African-born Elon Musk, one of Trump’s closest advisers at the time, had also vocally condemned the country’s alleged discrimination against its white farmers.

While Trump and former Fox News Channel host Tucker Carlson have pushed the narrative of Afrikaner persecution for several years, the claims don’t appear to be supported by data. According to South African crime data, murders of white farmers make up less than 1 percent of the country’s 27,000 murders annually.

In an Oval Office meeting with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa just days after those Afrikaners were offered refugee status, Trump presented his case, playing videos for Ramaphosa that he said were proof of the “genocide.”

“Have they told you where that is, Mr. President?” Ramaphosa said in response to the claims. “I’d like to know where that is, because this I’ve never seen.”

In the post to Truth Social on Friday, Trump continued to rail against the South African government, saying it “refuses to acknowledge or address the horrific Human Rights Abuses endured by Afrikaners, and other descendants of Dutch, French, and German settlers.”

“To put it more bluntly, they are killing white people, and randomly allowing their farms to be taken from them,” Trump wrote.