Jesus Christ, I wish this could still surprise me.
A recent report from The New York Times, detailing Trump’s aggressively xenophobic and ill-considered immigration policies, also included a disturbing write-up of the way that Trump talks about immigrants behind closed doors. According to the Times‘ sources, Trump said that Nigerians live in huts and Haitian immigrants “all have AIDS.”
Haiti had sent 15,000 people. They “all have AIDS,” he grumbled, according to one person who attended the meeting and another person who was briefed about it by a different person who was there.
Forty thousand had come from Nigeria, Mr. Trump added. Once they had seen the United States, they would never “go back to their huts” in Africa, recalled the two officials, who asked for anonymity to discuss a sensitive conversation in the Oval Office.
Trump’s racism and xenophobia are a well-established part of his rhetoric, and it’s not surprising that Haiti and Nigeria received particular vitriol from him. They are not only foreign countries, but majority-black foreign countries. Trump’s anti-black animus, from his racial discrimination suits to his hatred of the exonerated Central Park Five, has been well-documented, and when it collides with his hatred of immigrants, you get this cloud of vicious ignorance.
It feels rather ridiculous to even justify these comments with a factual response, but just in case, let’s remind the racists of reality. Nigeria is, of course, Africa’s largest economy and the world’s 20th largest, and Nigerian-Americans are one of the most highly educated demographics in the United States. With an approximately 2.1% prevalence rate in adults, Haiti does have one of the highest HIV/AIDS rates in the Caribbean, and they deserve UN and US aid to combat this. But that rate is still only 2.1% of the population.
Unsurprisingly, the Trump administration denies that this exchange ever occurred. “General Kelly, General McMaster, Secretary Tillerson, Secretary Nielsen and all other senior staff actually in the meeting deny these outrageous claims,” said White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders. “It’s both sad and telling The New York Times would print the lies of their anonymous ‘sources’ anyway.”
However, just as unsurprisingly, this denial is difficult to believe given Trump’s many equally egregious statements about Mexicans, Muslims, and other immigrants. His policies also speak for themselves. This is the man who ended temporary protected status for some 59,000 Haitians who were displaced by the 2010 earthquake. This is the man who wants to ban all travelers from Chad, Iran, Libya, Syria, Somalia, and Yemen. This is the man who ended DACA.
“Unfortunately, it is all too believable that this is how our president speaks behind closed doors,” said Opal Tometi, a Nigerian-American who serves as executive director of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, “because his very public policies have been driven by racism and hatred since Day 1. From his xenophobic Muslim ban to his cruel and immoral treatment of immigrant dreamers, this merely adds crass words to the racist policies this administration has been pushing for a year. President Trump is mentally incapable of imagining the humanity of anyone who looks different from him or hails from a different nation.”
(Via Chicago Tribune and New York Magazine; image: Shutterstock)
Want more stories like this? Become a subscriber and support the site!
—The Mary Sue has a strict comment policy that forbids, but is not limited to, personal insults toward anyone, hate speech, and trolling.—
