Donald Trump has nominated a conservative, pro-Israel media activist as US ambassador to South Africa at a time when the relationship between the two countries is at a nadir.
Leo Brent Bozell III founded the Media Research Center – whose website states it is “a blog site designed to broadcast conservative values, culture, and politics [and] to expose liberal media bias” – in 1987.
His son Leo Brent Bozell IV was sentenced to 45 months in prison in May 2024 for assaulting police and smashing windows in the 6 January 2021 Capitol riots. He was released in January as part of Trump’s mass pardon.
The 69-year-old’s nomination, which needs to be confirmed by the Republican-controlled Senate, comes after South Africa’s ambassador to Washington, Ebrahim Rasool, was expelled earlier this month, and amid US claims that South Africa is discriminating against its white minority.
Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, had called Rasool “a race-baiting politician who hates America” after Rasool told a think tank that Trump’s MAGA movement was partly a response to “a supremacist instinct”.
In February, Trump signed an executive order cutting aid to South Africa, accusing it of racial discrimination against white Afrikaners, who ruled the country during apartheid. The order also offered them refugee resettlement.
South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, told reporters on Tuesday he would appoint a “top-class” replacement for Rasool. He added that US funding cuts were “entirely within their right … and in many ways a wake-up call … [to be] more self-reliant.”
The US- South Africa relationship worsened under the previous US president, Joe Biden, after South Africa refused to take sides when Russia invaded Ukraine. In 2023, the then-US ambassador, Reuben Brigety, accused South Africa of supplying Russia with arms.
