The former guy on Hannity last night:
“You know, there’s one other thing that nobody talks about. So we have hundreds of thousands of people flowing in from Haiti. Haiti has a tremendous AIDS problem.”
“AIDS is a step beyond. AIDS is a real bad problem. So, hundreds of thousands of people are coming into our country. And if you look at the stats, if you look at the numbers, if you look at just — take a look at what’s happening in Haiti, a tremendous problem with AIDS. Many of those people will probably have AIDS, and they’re coming into our country. And we don’t do anything about it. We let everybody come in. Sean, it’s like a death wish. It’s like a death wish for our country.”
A s Philip Bump pointed out, the White House denied that Trump had said similar things when it was reported during his term:
A few months after he took office in 2017, President Donald Trump was handed a list of visas granted by the United States that year. He took the document (helpfully provided by aide Stephen Miller) to a meeting with advisers at the White House where, according to New York Times reporting, he began insulting various countries as undesirable or disease-ridden.
Allowing 40,000 Nigerians to come to the United States, he reportedly said, meant they would never “go back to their huts” in their home countries. And allowing 15,000 people from Haiti was a risk, he said, because they “all have AIDS.”
Then-White House press secretary Sarah Sanders denied the report in unflinching terms.
“General [John] Kelly, General [Henry] McMaster, Secretary [Rex] Tillerson, Secretary [Kirstjen] Nielsen and all other senior staff actually in the meeting deny these outrageous claims,” she said. “It’s both sad and telling the New York Times would print the lies of their anonymous ‘sources’ anyway.”
It’s likely that few people actually believed this denial. Trump’s critics saw the language as very much in line with the president’s standard fare; many of his supporters would not be worried that he had said it. When The Washington Post reported in January 2018 that he again had disparaged African countries and wondered why the United States “needed” more Haitians (“Take them out,” he reportedly said), it simply reinforced the hollowness of the denial.
Back then, Trump was still new to politics broadly and the presidency specifically. He still had a team around him — Chief of Staff Kelly, Secretary of State Tillerson — who were not die-hard adherents to his worldview and who often worked to contain his more reckless impulses. He was, to some extent, still constrained.
Since his impeachments, election loss and renewed confidence in his political support, Trump is no longer constrained. And so there’s no more pretense, no more politically softened insistence that the Times and Post were wrong and that claims Trump said anything so cruel about Haitians were “outrageous.” Now, he just goes on Fox News and says it.
Let’s hear some more caterwauling from Republicans about “civility” shall we?
He is a pig and we knew that. But his piggish ways are becoming more pronounced as he now fully understands that he can openly and crudely insult anyone on earth except his base and there will be no repercussions. It’s going to get even uglier, I’m afraid, so fasten your seatbelts.