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No, President Trump isn't crazy, he's just racist

By Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on

OK, can we finally stop beating around the bush and say outright that President Donald J. Trump is a white supremacist?

As our nation heads into the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend, our gaffe-prone president, who began the week by fending off allegations of mental unfitness, finished it by denying charges that he is a racist.

In a story first reported by the Washington Post and confirmed by NBC News, Trump was speaking to lawmakers Thursday when he angrily slammed their desire to restore protections for refugees from Haiti, El Salvador and some African countries.

"Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?" said the President of the United States.

Trump was balking at an immigration deal that would include protections for people from Haiti and some nations in Africa. Instead, according to reports, Trump expressed a preference for immigrants from places like Norway, whose prime minister he welcomed a day earlier and which also happens to be one of the world's whitest countries.

After a night of broadcasters debating whether to quote Trump's vulgarity out loud or bleep it, Trump tweeted a denial on Friday morning that he had used such language at all, although Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, and other witnesses confirmed the reported words.

 

"I have a wonderful relationship with Haitians," Trump tweeted. "Probably should record future meetings -- unfortunately, no trust!"

Trust? Two days earlier the Washington Post's Fact Checker column announced a historic milestone: the president had broken 2,000 in the number of false or misleading claims he had made in his first year in office. And he wonders why there is "no trust."

By then, the first black female Republican woman in Congress, Utah Rep. Mia Love, who also happens to be the child of Haitian immigrants, demanded an apology from the president, saying his comments were "unkind, divisive, elitist and fly in the face of our nation's values."

Rep. Love noted in her emotional statement that her parents "never took a thing" from the government as they worked hard to achieve the American dream. Indeed, that classic story of enterprising immigrants who contribute far more to this country than they take away continues today, despite the ill-informed stereotypes that infect today's immigration debate.

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(c) 2018 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

 

 

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