Trump’s motives laid bare
President Trump’s profanely expressed racism has reverberated across the nation and globe, roiling international relationships and his anti-immigration agenda. He and his allies were rattled enough to venture a series of dubious, hairsplitting denials.
Anyone acquainted with Trump’s history of race-baiting might wonder why he would take pains to obfuscate the latest example. The answer is that his campaign against nonwhite immigration relies on the thin pretense that the law, economics, security or anything else besides ethnicity is at issue. Deploring legal immigration for no reason other than its origin threatens to expose his project as politically untenable bigotry.
Trump reportedly longed for immigration from Europe rather than “shithole countries” in Africa, the Caribbean and Central America when presented with a bipartisan agreement to restore Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, President Barack Obama’s order protecting those brought to the country illegally as minors. Accounts by the Washington Post and others were confirmed in no uncertain terms by Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill. and, in essence, by Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., both of whom attended the Oval Office meeting.
The denials, by contrast, were worded all too carefully. Sens. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., and David Perdue, R-Ga., who were also present, said initially that they did “not recall the president saying these comments specifically” and later that he didn’t utter that particular obscenity. Trump Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen maintained that she didn’t “recall him saying that exact phrase.” Trump himself said his language at the meeting “was tough, but this was not the language used.” The delicate distinctions apparently at issue concerned whether Trump applied the vulgarity only to Africa or also to Haiti and El Salvador and, of even weightier diplomatic significance, whether he actually said “shithouse” or “shithole.”
No matter which excrementbased epithet the president applied to other people’s homelands, the trouble for him and his allies is not just that governments from Pretoria to Port-au-Prince are demanding an explanation. It’s that he plainly admitted — on the weekend set aside to honor the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., no less — that this all comes down to sorting one color from another, a habit that is rooted deep in the president’s past and extends even to his prolific junk food consumption.
That is why the president was compelled to wax Nixonian by proclaiming “I’m not a racist,” while blaming the all-but-powerless Democrats for failing to restore DACA. In fact, it was Trump who rescinded those protections and, rather than using those affected as hostages to push effectively complexionbased restrictions on legal immigration, could grant them relief if he wanted to with the stroke of a pen. His vulgar commentary is dogging him because it explains, in damning and unvarnished terms, why he won’t.