Libya summoned the top American diplomat in Tripoli on Sunday to protest remarks by President Donald Trump, who called the North African nation "terror-infested" during a campaign rally in Georgia — reviving, word for word, the slur that defined his first-term immigration fights.
Libya's foreign ministry said it summoned the U.S. chargé d'affaires to protest statements it described as "offensive" and said it rejected any statements that "undermine the dignity of its people or diminish their standing."
The protest came a day after Trump, speaking at a rally in Perry, Georgia, on Saturday, attacked Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia over immigration. "Jon Ossoff personally sponsored a bill to bring armies of migrants from terror-infested countries like Libya, Yemen, Haiti, Somalia," Trump said. "Remember what I called them? Shithouse countries," he added, in a reference to the remarks he made about African nations during his first term.
A rare show of unity in divided Libya
The backlash crossed Libya's political divide. The country's rival administrations in the east and west both denounced Trump's remarks, rejecting attempts to draw Libya into what they called "electoral debates." Libya has been split between competing governments since the fall of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, and the two sides rarely agree in public — making the joint condemnation a measure of how the comments landed in Tripoli.
Trump responded on Truth Social on Sunday night, saying the United States was committed to its ties with Libya and calling its people "proud, resilient, hospitable, and deserving of peace and prosperity." In the same message, however, he doubled down on the substance of the dispute: "We respect the Libyan people and the sacrifices that brave Libyans made fighting ISIS, the common enemy of both our peoples, but Libya cannot remain a corridor for illegal migration, and this must end now," he wrote.
Migration at the center of the midterms
The clash lands eight days before the November 3 midterm elections, with immigration once again at the center of Trump's closing argument. The president has spent the final stretch of the campaign attacking Democrats over migration, and the Perry rally was part of a weekend swing through battleground Senate states — he campaigned in Michigan on Sunday and heads to Corinth, Mississippi, on Monday night.
Libya, for its part, has long been a transit point for migrants crossing the Mediterranean toward Europe, and the country has faced repeated international pressure over the treatment of migrants detained there. The foreign ministry's protest, however, was about the words, not the policy: Tripoli objected to being branded a "terror-infested" country in an American campaign speech, and it used the formal diplomatic channel — summoning the U.S. envoy — to say so.
Fuentes: Reuters, 26 oct 2026; 94.7 The Beast / Thomson Reuters, 25 oct 2026.