President Donald Trump turned his Twitter torment Monday on the Democrat in the room where immigration talks with lawmakers took a famously coarse turn, saying Senator Dick Durbin misrepresented what he had said about African nations and Haiti and, in the process, undermined the trust needed to make a deal.<\/p>\n
On a day of remembrance for Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Trump spent time at his golf course with no public events, bypassing the acts of service that his predecessor staged in honour of the civil rights leader. Instead Trump dedicated his weekly address to King\u2019s memory, saying King\u2019s dream and America\u2019s are the same: \u201cA world where people are judged by who they are, not how they look or where they come from.\u201d<\/p>\n
That message was a distinct counterpoint to words attributed to Trump by Durbin and others at a meeting last week, when the question of where immigrants come from seemed at the forefront of Trump\u2019s concerns. Some participants and others familiar with the conversation said Trump challenged immigration from \u201cshithole\u201d countries of Africa and disparaged Haiti as well.<\/p>\n
Without explicitly denying using that word, Trump lashed out at the Democratic senator, who said Trump uttered it on several occasions.<\/p>\n
\u201cSenator Dicky Durbin totally misrepresented what was said at the DACA meeting,\u201d Trump tweeted, using a nickname to needle the Illinois senator. \u201cDeals can\u2019t get made when there is no trust! Durbin blew DACA and is hurting our Military.\u201d<\/p>\n
He was referring to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which protects young people who came to the US illegally as children. Members of Congress from both parties are trying to strike a deal that Trump would support to extend that protection.<\/p>\n
As well, Durbin and people who were briefed on the conversation but were not authorised to describe it publicly said Trump also questioned the need to admit more Haitians. They said Trump expressed a preference for immigrants from countries like Norway, which is overwhelmingly white.<\/p>\n
Republican Sens. David Perdue of Georgia and Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who also attended, initially said they did not hear Trump utter the word in question, then revised their account to deny he said it at all.<\/p>\n
There is some internal West Wing debate whether Trump said \u201cshithole\u201d or \u201cshithouse.\u201d One person who attended the meeting told aides they heard the latter expletive, while others recall the president saying the more widely reported \u201cshithole,\u201d according to a person briefed on the meeting but not authorised to speak publicly about private conversations.<\/p>\n
The person believes the discrepancy may be why some Republican senators are denying having heard the president say \u201cshithouse.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump has not clarified to aides what he said. The White House has not denied that Trump used a vulgar term, and there appears to be little difference in meaning between the two words.<\/p>\n
The reverberations kept coming Monday.<\/p>\n
Martin Luther King III, King\u2019s elder son, said: \u201cWhen a president insists that our nation needs more citizens from white states like Norway, I don\u2019t even think we need to spend any time even talking about what it says and what it is.\u201d<\/p>\n
A sizeable crowd of expatriate Haitians, waving their country\u2019s flag, gathered near the foot of a bridge leading to Trump\u2019s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, to jeer at Trump as the motorcade returned from the golf club where the president capped his weekend before returning later Monday to Washington.<\/p>\n
The Haitians and their supporters shouted, \u201cOur country is not a shithole,\u201d according to video posted by WPEC-TV, and engaged in a shouting match with the pro-Trump demonstrators who typically gather on the other side of the street.<\/p>\n
On Sunday, vice-president Mike Pence, who worshipped at a Baptist church in Maryland, listened as the pastor denounced Trump\u2019s use of vulgarity.<\/p>\n
Maurice Watson, pastor of Metropolitan Baptist Church in Largo, called the reported remark \u201cdehumanising\u201d and \u201cugly\u201d and said \u201cwhoever made such a statement … is wrong and they ought to be held accountable.\u201d Worshippers stood and applauded as Watson spoke.<\/p>\n
Durbin said after the Oval Office meeting that Trump\u2019s words to the senators were \u201cvile, hate-filled and clearly racial in their content\u201d.<\/p>\n
A confidant of Trump told The Associated Press that the president spent Thursday evening calling friends and outside advisers to judge their reaction to his remarks. Trump wasn\u2019t apologetic and denied he was racist, said the confidant, who wasn\u2019t authorised to disclose a private conversation and spoke on condition of anonymity.<\/p>\n
Afterward Trump insisted in a tweet that he \u201cnever said anything derogatory about Haitians other than Haiti is, obviously, a very poor and troubled country. Never said \u2018take them out.\u2019 Made up by Dems.\u201d Trump wrote, \u201cI have a wonderful relationship with Haitians.\u201d<\/p>\n
The contentious comments came as Durbin was presenting details of a compromise immigration plan that had money for a first instalment of the president\u2019s long-sought border wall.<\/p>\n
Trump took particular issue with the idea that people who\u2019d fled to the US after disasters hit their homes in places such as El Salvador, Guatemala and Haiti would be allowed to stay as part of the deal, according to the people briefed on the conversation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
President Donald Trump turned his Twitter torment Monday on the Democrat in the room where immigration talks with lawmakers took a famously coarse turn, saying Senator Dick Durbin misrepresented what he had said about African nations and Haiti and, in the process, undermined the trust needed to make a deal. On a day of remembrance […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":18798,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18797","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18797","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18797"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18797\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18799,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18797\/revisions\/18799"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18798"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18797"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18797"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18797"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}