Tags
Breitbart, Donald Trump, Fox News, Jeremy Carl, Jim Sciutto, National Review, New York Times, Rich Lowry, Tucker Carlson
I probably don’t need to tell you that this happened:
President Trump on Thursday balked at an immigration deal that would include protections for people from Haiti and some nations in Africa, demanding to know at a White House meeting why he should accept immigrants from “shithole countries” rather than from places like Norway, according to people with direct knowledge of the conversation.
Mr. Trump’s remarks, the latest example of his penchant for racially tinged remarks denigrating immigrants, left members of Congress from both parties attending the meeting in the Cabinet Room alarmed and mystified. He made them during a discussion of an emerging bipartisan deal to give legal status to immigrants illegally brought to the United States as children, those with knowledge of the conversation said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the meeting.
In a normal country, or in a country where the president is a Democrat, you wouldn’t have a wing of the media that looks at a comment in which the president refers to most of Africa and Haiti and others as “shithole countries” and conclude that he’s right and everyone else is just being a pussy snowflake. But we don’t live in that country:
From Jeremy Carl at National Review:
Once again Donald Trump has inartfully stumbled on a truth—and our thoroughly corrupt media, race-baiting Democrats, and too many amnesty-loving GOP politicians, couldn’t be angrier.
Of course, it would be best if President ’t denigrate other countries, even in a semi-private setting. And of course, his language was crude. And yes, of course, America gets a lot of wonderful immigrants from all around the globe, and we should always point that out.
But that doesn’t mean there aren’t profound geography-related differences in how successful our immigrants are. The UN Human Development Index, The most widely accepted metric for how not like a well,–you know what– a given country is, ranks Norway (the country Trump mentioned he wanted more immigrants from), as #1 in the world. El Salvador ranked 117th. Haiti was 163rd and every single one of the 25 countries ranked below it (with the exception of the garden spots of Afghanistan and Yemen) was in Africa. All other things being relatively equal, Why shouldn’t we want immigrants from countries with healthy functioning societies that are doing well, people who have grown up enmeshed in strong institutions—rather than some of the world’s most impoverished and dysfunctional places?
The headline over at Breitbart:
I pondered the other day whether a possible DACA deal, despite securing funding for a border fence (not a wall, a fence), could lead to an actual fracture in the base in the way nothing else has so far—immigration policies are more tangible than, say, a tax plan, so it’s harder to fool people about what it is you’re doing. His base really do seem to be upset about DACA, which is one of their more obvious displays of racism and xenophobia, so I have to think these comments are meant to energize and reassure his base that he hates immigrants (black and brown immigrants, specifically), too. At least, that’s the way it’s playing out. White House staffers are enjoying themselves:
And here’s the official White House response, which neither denies that Trump said “shithole countries” or that such a statement would be a bad or inappropriate thing:
Do I think #MAGA types are stupid enough to be duped into ignoring the fact that legislation they fiercely oppose—legislation on an issue that was for many of them the most important, number one issue regarding why they voted for Trump—by this kind of tough-guy rhetoric? Yes, yes I do. Here are some celebratory comments from Fox News readers, a story which now has over 25,000 comments:
Hillary Clinton said during the campaign that a man you could bait with a tweet was not someone you could trust with a nuclear arsenal. The same thing is true about voters who get excited about comments that cause “liberal tears”; anyone who can be baited with racist comments can’t be trusted with a vote.
American Orthodox 