No U.S. government officials will attend the Group of 20 summit this year in South Africa, President Trump said on Friday, repeating the claim that the country’s white farmers were being killed and abused.
Mr. Trump had already announced he would not attend the annual summit for heads of state, with Vice President JD Vance being scheduled to attend in the president’s place. However, a person familiar with Vance’s plans who was granted anonymity to talk about his schedule said the vice president would no longer travel for the summit.
“It is a total disgrace that the G20 will be held in South Africa. Afrikaners (People who are descended from Dutch settlers, and also French and German immigrants) are being killed and slaughtered, and their land and farms are being illegally confiscated,” Mr. Trump said in a Truth Social post on Friday. “No U.S. Government Official will attend as long as these Human Rights abuses continue. I look forward to hosting the 2026 G20 in Miami, Florida!”
South Africa’s foreign ministry called Mr. Trump’s comments “regrettable” and said it is looking forward to hosting a “successful” summit.
“The characterisation of Afrikaners as an exclusively white group is ahistorical. Furthermore, the claim that this community faces persecution is not substantiated by fact,” it said in a statement.
The theme for this year’s summit in Johannesburg is “Solidarity, Equality, Sustainability.”
The Trump administration has long accused the South African government of allowing minority white Afrikaner farmers to be persecuted and attacked. As it restricted the number of refugees admitted annually to the U.S. to 7,500, the administration indicated that most would be white South Africans who it claimed faced discrimination and violence at home.
The government of South Africa has said it is surprised by the accusations of discrimination, because white people in the country generally have a much higher standard of living than its Black residents, more than three decades after the end of the apartheid system of white minority rule.
The country’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, has said he’s told Mr. Trump that information about the alleged discrimination and persecution of Afrikaners is “completely false.”
Nonetheless, the administration has kept up its criticisms of the South African government. Earlier this week, during an economic speech in Miami, Trump said South Africa should be thrown out of the Group of 20.
Earlier this year, Secretary of State Marco Rubio boycotted a G20 meeting for foreign ministers because its agenda focused on diversity, inclusion and climate change efforts.
