President Trump grew frustrated with lawmakers Thursday in the Oval Office when they discussed protecting immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador and African countries as part of a bipartisan immigration deal, according to several people briefed on the meeting.
“Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” Trump said, according to these people, referring to countries mentioned by the lawmakers. Trump then suggested that the United States should instead bring more people from countries such as Norway, whose prime minister he met with Wednesday.
The president, according to a White House official, also suggested he would be open to more immigrants from Asian countries because he felt that they help the United States economically.
In addition, the president singled out Haiti, telling lawmakers that immigrants from that country must be left out of any deal, these people said. “Why do we need more Haitians?” Trump said, according to people familiar with the meeting. “Take them out.”
The president of the United States is racist.
“This is CNN Tonight, I’m Don Lemon. The president of the United States is racist. A lot of us already knew that.” The CNN anchor’s ice-cold open to his newscast on Thursday night was stunning and yet 100 percent spot-on — and a sign that America has crossed a Rubicon of sorts in our tortured, centuries-long history of how this nation treats race and ethnicity, which is the defining debate in our ever-present schizophrenia over what this nation really stands for.
In the Donald Trump era’s crack-addled hyperactive news cycle, it was a long time ago — a.k.a. Thursday — that the 45th president of the United States sat at his desk in the Oval Office and told some 50 lawmakers and aides that he didn’t want a flood of immigrants from “shithole countries” in Africa, part of a longer rap in which he denigrated immigration from places where the people are black — Haiti, Africa — while talking up blond and blue-eyed arrivals from Norway. It’s impossible to find the right word to express the inhumanity of Trump’s open-for-all-to-see beliefs. Horrific? Morally unconscionable? None seems to express the full outrage.
On the weekend when America honors what would have been the 89th birthday of our greatest advocate for human rights, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the nation is now led by a man who clearly judges people not by the content of their character but by the color of their skin. The president of the United States is racist. But as Don Lemon stated with high-def clarity, a lot of us already knew that.
When America went to the polls on Nov. 8, 2016, we already knew so much. We knew that the federal government slammed Trump and his dad — who’d been arrested in his younger days at a KKK rally — for not renting to blacks in the 1970s, that Trump said in the 1980s that he wanted Jews and not blacks counting his money, that he purchased a full-page New York Times ad calling for the death penalty for five young blacks later found to be completely innocent (for which he still won’t apologize), that he re-ignited his political fortunes by insisting the first African American president couldn’t be a real American, and then ran a campaign centered on a wall to keep out Mexican “rapists,” a travel ban based on people’s Muslim religion, and punctuated by trafficking in the worst stereotypes about “inner cities.”
