'No US government official will attend’: Trump to boycott G20 in Johannesburg, calls event in South Africa a ‘total disgrace’

US President Donald Trump on Friday said that no American government official would attend the upcoming G20 summit in Johannesburg, calling it a “total disgrace” and citing South Africa’s treatment of white farmers.

The summit was set for November 22 and 23, and the announcement overrode plans for Vice President JD Vance to attend in Trump’s place.




“No US Government Official will attend as long as these Human Rights abuses continue,” Trump said. “I look forward to hosting the 2026 G20 in Miami, Florida!”



Trump claimed that Afrikaners – white South African farmers of mostly Dutch descent in the majority black nation – were “being killed and slaughtered, and their land and farms are being illegally confiscated.”

The South African govenment strongly denied the accusations of racial discrimination, which Trump had made repeatedly over the past year.

The G20 includes the 19 largest world economies, plus the European Union and the African Union, and promotes cooperation to advance global economic interests. In September Trump announced he would host the 2026 G20 Summit at his golf resort in Doral, Florida, the same property near Miami where he had tried unsuccessfully to convene world leaders during his first term.

Afrikaners are descendants of Dutch colonists who ruled South Africa under apartheid, a system of legalised segregation that deprived the majority of citizens of basic rights and ended in 1994. Many white South Africans now say they are unfairly targeted by a new law this year that allows the South African govt to seize property for the “public interest” without compensation in some cases.

Trump’s support for the Afrikaners dated to his first term but gained force in his second term after the Expropriation Act became law in February. “I am not going,” Trump said on November 5 during a speech in Miami. “We have a G20 meeting in South Africa. South Africa shouldn’t even be in the Gs anymore because what’s happened there is bad.”

Upon returning to office in January Trump suspended the refugee admissions programme except for white South Africans, who began arriving in the United States as refugees in May. For 2026 the administration limited refugee admissions to 7,500 – the lowest in history – and most of those admitted would be white South Africans.

In the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, D.C. on May 21-2025 President Donald Trump held up a printed article from “American Thinker” while accusing President Cyril Ramaphosa of state-sanctioned violence against white farmers. He later hosted President Ramaphosa for an Oval Office meeting that quickly turned into an ambush as he accused him of overseeing “genocide” against White people and played a video to try to prove the false claim.