“How is he going to play it off this time?,” the public wondered after learning that the president of the United States had reportedly, in the course of discussing a bipartisan deal on DACA, referred to entire nations of (non-white) people in the Caribbean and Africa as “shithole countries” while bemoaning the lack of meritorious (white) Norwegian immigrants ditching their universal healthcare for the amber waves of corn subsidies. Because the news isn’t all that shocking, coming from Mr. “Mexicans Are Rapists, But Neo-Nazis Are Fine People”—and while we don’t want to believe that we’re already that burnt-out on 2018, such racist remarks are part and parcel of this presidency.
And so, rather than let Sarah Huckabee Sanders try to spin this by, we don’t know, saying “shithole” is almost certainly a term of endearment in one of those countries’ languages, Trump did his own damage control from atop his porcelain throne this morning, tweeting a partial denial of the reports.
You can simmer down now, snowflakes, because the only derogatory thing Trump said about Haiti is that it’s “a very poor and troubled country.” Yes, we know, Trump is acknowledging that he believes “poor” is an insult (which tracks with what we know of the president) while ignoring that today marks the 8th anniversary of the catastrophic earthquake that struck the island nation, and from which it is still recovering. But he has to overlook all of that, because it would probably get folks thinking about Puerto Rico again.
Even as we shudder at the thought of listening to recordings of his verbal diarrhea in an effort for transparency, we have to note that Trump didn’t refute the claims from people who attended the meeting and said the president made it clear that he’d much light a beacon for Nordic types. Even his preceding tweets don’t deny it, but they do attempt to paint the Democratic senators—who attempted to reach an agreement with Republican senators and the idiot president on the status of the hundreds of thousands of immigrants at risk—as veterans benefits-stealing, crime-embracing officials, who are trying to make the country vulnerable to whatever the latest scapegoat this administration has dreamed up:
Never mind that diverting some money from this country’s exorbitant defense budget isn’t a bad idea, or that government shutdowns are a familiar GOP ploy, or that the reason we might need the military right now is because of Trump’s thin skin, which Mystic Tan has done nothing to fortify. Once again, Trump avoids culpability while still stoking the racist fires that fueled his way to the White House. No wonder Don Lemon’s cold open last night of “The president is a racist” sounded so matter of fact.