Around this time eight years ago, Donald Trump referred to Haiti and African nations as “s–––hole countries” during a meeting with a bipartisan group of senators at the White House, sparking an immediate controversy. The incident, which happened behind closed doors, was a timely reminder of the president’s racism and its influence on his international perspective.
Eight years later, the Republican’s private racism has become his public racism. The New York Times reported on Trump’s Tuesday night speech in Pennsylvania:
Soon after, a member of the crowd yelled out a crude term that Mr. Trump used during his first administration to disparage Haiti and some nations in Africa. The president laughed.
‘I didn’t say ‘s–––hole,’ you did!’ Mr. Trump replied with a grin. He then recounted his use of the term at a White House meeting in 2018 to describe countries that he was balking at accepting immigrants from.
After the 2018 incident, Trump and his team insisted that he never actually used the term, despite the claims from those who heard him say it.
On Tuesday night, however, he dropped the pretense.
Describing the 2018 White House meeting, the president told rally attendees, “We want to be honest, because our country was going to hell, and we had a meeting and I say, ‘Why is it we only take people from s–––hole countries, right? Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden — just a few — let us have a few from Denmark. Do you mind sending us a few people? Send us some nice people, do you mind?”
The message wasn’t exactly subtle: Trump is fine with immigration, so long as it’s white people coming to American soil.
But as important — and contemptible — as the president’s racism is, let’s also not lose sight of the broader political shift: In 2018, Trump didn’t want to be seen as a bigot, so he strenuously denied using the phrase that a room full of people heard him say. In 2025, Trump seems to take a degree of pride in using the term at a campaign-style address. His remarks came a week after he referred to Somali immigrants as “garbage.” A New York Times report described it “an outburst that captured the raw nativism that has animated his approach to immigration,” adding that the president’s condemnation “was shocking in its unapologetic bigotry.” A week later, the brazenness of Trump’s racism was apparent once more.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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