Trump admits and boasts about insulting Haiti and African countries.
The Associated Press reported on Wednesday that Trump made the remarks behind closed doors at the time, but later denied them after the news broke. However, he repeated them without hesitation to a crowd in Pennsylvania on Tuesday, even calling Somalia “dirty, polluted, disgusting, and full of crime.”
Trump was referring to his recent announcement to “permanently stop immigration from the Third World, including from hellholes like Afghanistan, Haiti, Somalia and many other countries,” when one attendee shouted the slogan for 2018. That prompted Trump to recount the incident.
“We had a meeting and I said, ‘Why are we only accepting people from trashy countries? Why can’t we have people from Norway or Sweden?” he told supporters.
“But we always take people from Somalia,” he continued. Places that are a disaster, dirty, polluted, disgusting, and full of crime.”
The White House did not deny the remarks at the time, and Trump tweeted the following day: “That was not the language I used. I have never said anything disparaging about Haiti.”
In 2018, the remarks, which disparaged predominantly black countries and called for more immigration from white countries, were widely condemned as racist.
Some Republicans in Congress also condemned them, and foreign leaders were outraged. The government of Botswana summoned the U.S. ambassador, and the president of Senegal said he was shocked by the remarks and that “Africa and the black race deserve the respect and consideration of all.”
Since then, Trump has abandoned many of the norms and traditions of political etiquette observed by his predecessors. He often laces his public remarks with profanity.
On Thanksgiving, he belittled Minnesota Governor Tim Walz with an old, derogatory term for people with intellectual disabilities in a series of lengthy social media posts about immigrants.
When a reporter asked if he still approved of making those comments, Trump said without regret: “Yes. I think he has a problem.”