Trump: We Need to Keep Out People From “Shithole Countries”

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I’m back from lunch. It’s a nice day, so I walked. There was a lovely egret in our storm channel that I’d like to get a picture of someday. So did anything happen while I was go—

President Trump grew frustrated with lawmakers Thursday in the Oval Office when they floated restoring protections for immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador and African countries as part of a bipartisan immigration deal, according to two 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 African countries and Haiti. He then suggested that the United States should instead bring more people from countries like Norway, whose prime minister he met Wednesday.

That’s from the Washington Post. Apparently the White House isn’t denying that Trump said this, which prompted the following from CNN’s White House correspondent, Jim Acosta:

What we have to come to grips with—and I almost have to think back to the day when we were at Trump Tower when the president was commenting on Charlottesville, and he was saying there were very fine people on both sides, saying there were very fine people among the white supremacists and the Nazis—is that the president of the United States just seems to have a problem here, Wolf, in this area. And 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 from other parts of the world.

This statement from Trump, Acosta said, “cuts to the very core of who he is.”

DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

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DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And we need your support like never before, to fight back against the existential threats American democracy faces. Fundraising for nonprofit media is always a challenge, and we need all hands on deck right now. We have no cushion; we leave it all on the field.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

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