The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021

by Peter Baker

Trump ritually denied being a bigot. “I am the least racist person you have ever met,” he said over and over.[23] But he did not seem to mind that he left the opposite impression. Once he became president, his “very fine people” remarks in the aftermath of the white supremacist march in Charlottesville were followed by plenty of others—the Haitian immigrants who “all have AIDS,” the African visitors who would never “go back to their huts,” the “shithole” countries sending too many people to the United States.[24] He declared that four liberal Democratic congresswomen of color who called themselves the Squad should “go back” to their home countries, even though three of them were born in the United States and all were citizens.[25] He attacked Elijah Cummings, the Black congressman from Baltimore who was Mark Meadows’s friend, for representing a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess” where “no human being would want to live.” In meetings, he deployed racial and ethnic stereotypes that shocked even senior military types accustomed to rough language. “He would say stuff like, ‘Who gives a shit about Korea? You can’t sell a goddamn Ford in Korea, who cares? Why the fuck are we there? Why do I give a shit about these rathole countries in Africa? What the fuck are we doing in Niger?’ ” recalled a senior national security official who spent a lot of time with him.