Breaking news: Donald Trump is racist.
The latest example of his racism occurred Thursday afternoon when Trump, according to the Washington Post, grew frustrated with the idea of restoring protection for immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador, and African countries. “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” he asked, wondering aloud why more Norwegians — the world’s happiest people — couldn’t come to the U.S. instead.
It’s not the first time Trump has insulted immigrants from Africa and Haiti either. In June, he said Haitians “all have AIDS” and that Nigerians would never “go back to their huts” once they come to the U.S.
Despite Trump’s extensive history of racist comments and policies, Thursday’s revelation still shocked members of the media — and some finally called it what it is.
“Parents if you’re watching with children you might want to mute for the next 35 seconds,” Jake Tapper solemnly warned before detailing the latest remarks. “This is beyond unbefitting, this beyond unpresidential… This is straight up racist,” Tapper’s guest, John Avlon, Editor-in-Chief of the Daily Beast, breathlessly announced.
The pundits were equally shocked on The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer. “I think what we have to come to grips with… is that the President of the United States seems to have a problem in this area,” said CNN’s chief White House correspondent Jim Acosta. “We can tiptoe around it, we can dance around it, and not really put our finger on it but the president seems to harbor racist feelings about people of color.”
“The president has racist views… How long do we have to dance around that issue?” CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin asked.
Meanwhile, former Never Trumper and Fox News contributor Erick Erickson wondered why the president would want to invite in “Norwegian socialists with no special love of America into the country.” Fox News’ Tucker Carlson was similarly unbothered by Trump’s racist remarks while Jesse Waters excused it as an example of how Trump “relates to people”.
“This is who Trump is. He doesn’t care. He shoots from the hip. And if he offends some people, fine,” Watters said on Fox News’ The Five. “There are so many more offensive things that are happening in this world.”
Of course, Trump’s history of racism goes back much further than his presidency. In 1973, he was sued by the federal government for racial discrimination against African Americans in his New York housing developments. In 1989, he called for the five African American and Latino teenagers — the Central Park Five — to be executed for a crime they did not commit. He launched his presidential bid in 2015 by labeling Mexicans rapists. In November, he called Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas” in front of a group of Native American veterans. The list goes on and on and on.
The White House, meanwhile, did not even bother to deny that Trump had made the “shithole” remark. “Certain Washington politicians choose to fight for foreign countries, but President Trump will always fight for the American people,” it proudly declared in a statement. “He will always reject temporary, weak and dangerous stopgap measures that threaten the lives of hardworking Americans, and undercut immigrants who seek a better life in the United States through legal pathway.”
Incidentally, tomorrow is also the eighth anniversary of the Haiti earthquake that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives in the country.