Trump is upping the xenophobia

Analysis by Aaron Blake, CNN

Analysis - President Donald Trump finally admitted Tuesday night that he referred to some countries, including heavily Black ones, as "shithole countries" back in 2018.

The first striking thing about that is that he's effectively admitting that he and some prominent Republicans were extremely dishonest about the episode.

Trump claimed at the time that "this was not the language used." A pair of GOP senators who were present at the closed-door meeting where he reportedly made the comment said they didn't recall him using such language. Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas said Trump offered no such sentiment. Then-Sen. David Perdue of Georgia said Trump did not use that word and called it a "gross misrepresentation."

It's not exactly news that Trump lies, but it is something to see him basically admit to a lie and to throw some allies who had vouched for him (and volunteered their own credibility) under the bus. And that should not get lost here.

(Neither the offices of Cotton nor Perdue, who now serves as Trump's ambassador to China, responded to a request for comment.)

But perhaps the more significant point in all of this is what it says about Trump's second term.

When he was reported to have said this during his first term, it was an international incident and even drew some harsh responses from Republicans.

But this week, during remarks in Pennsylvania when he confirmed he said it - and layered it with even more xenophobia - it was just a Tuesday.

Indeed, Republicans and others seem to have largely given up on policing Trump's xenophobic rhetoric, and he is now, perhaps not coincidentally, dispatching it much more liberally.

As with much of the president's agenda, things that were shocking in the first term are commonplace and seemingly unremarkable today. He has pushed the envelope just that far. The frog has been boiled.

Trump didn't just confirm the "shithole countries" remark Tuesday night (local time). (The context was about taking fewer immigrants from countries like Somalia and Haiti and more from countries like Norway, Sweden and Demark, which happen to be among the Whitest countries in the world.) He also unleashed a torrent of even uglier remarks.

He called Somalia "filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime." He referred to Rep. Ilhan Omar's headscarf as a "little turban" and encouraged the crowd to chant "send her back" to Somalia.

And all of this came just a week after Trump called Somalis "garbage" and said he didn't want them in the United States.

These episodes both carry echoes of his first term, but they were treated much differently back then, including by Trump.

For instance, when Trump in 2019 suggested that members of the so-called Democratic "Squad" like Omar should "go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came," it was widely condemned by Republicans. Some even called it racist.

Just days later, when Trump's supporters did the "send her back" chant about Omar, Trump claimed he disagreed with it. He tried to suggest he wasn't actually advocating for sending these members back, just making a friendly suggestion.

But this week, he egged on those chants, punctuating his Omar diatribe by saying, "She should get the hell out. Throw her the hell out."

A big difference is the way the GOP has responded. Back in Trump's first term, while Cotton and Perdue did the president a solid on "shithole countries," other Republicans didn't toe the line.

Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, for example, obliquely confirmed the remark at the time and signaled that he had reprimanded Trump for it in real time. Sen. Tim Scott, South Carolina's other senator and the only Black Republican in the Senate, said that if accurate, "the comment is incredibly disappointing." More than 20 Republican senators expressed disappointment, to one extent or another.

When a CNN reporter back then pressed Trump on the remarks at a later event, Trump declared, "I want [immigrants] to come in from everywhere."

Now, he's not even pretending that's true anymore. Trump's not just referring to "shithole" countries; he's proposing a ban on immigration from all "Third World countries" in the wake of a shooting in Washington, DC, that killed one National Guard member and critically wounded another.

It's a shift even from the 2024 campaign. When comedian Tony Hinchcliffe called Puerto Rico a "floating island of garbage" at a Trump rally late in the race, the Trump campaign distanced itself. Now the president is openly calling countries he doesn't like "garbage."

And perhaps the most telling aspect of the GOP's evolution on this involves Vice President JD Vance.

Long before he was Trump's vice presidential pick, Vance was a Trump-skeptical Republican. And one of his biggest issues with Trump was - or at least seemed to be - how he talked about immigrants.

"Trump makes people I care about afraid. Immigrants, Muslims, etc.," Vance posted on Twitter in 2016. "Because of this I find him reprehensible. God wants better of us."

By late in the 2024 campaign, though, Vance played a leading role in spreading baseless claims about Haitian migrants eating pets, even while freely admitting the stories might not be true. Some local Republicans objected, but the party was largely silent in the heat of the campaign.

And last week, as Trump engaged in arguably his ugliest comments yet - at least before Tuesday night - about sending "garbage" immigrants back to their countries, Vance banged on the table in apparent approval.

- CNN