In a term abounding with profane language, Donald Trump saved his most bitter remark for immigrants. You likely remember the comment. "Why are we having all these people from s---hole countries come here?" Trump asked in a closed-door 2018 meeting with mostly Republican senators, as reported by The Washington Post later that day.
He went on to identify Haiti, El Salvador and Africa as the countries in question - never mind that Africa is a continent - and he reserved special animus for Haiti. "Why do we need more Haitians?" he asked, according to people familiar with the meeting. "Take them out."
Trump would later claim he never used the s-word, but Raj Shah, then a spokesman for the White House, did not deny the slur, and when Jesse Watters, a co-host of Fox News' "The Five," considered Trump's tirade, he embraced it as a populist manifesto. "I think it's either fake news, or if it's true, this is how the forgotten men and women in America talk at the bar," Watters gushed.
I had a different reaction. To me, Trump's descriptor dehumanised several million individual lives, and it carried a troubling logic: If Haiti, El Salvador and African countries could be dismissed with an expletive, why worry about their fates as countries, or about how their problems have been caused partly by US policy?
As an travel writer, I try to regard other nations as hopeful places filled with intriguing surprises. But arguably, as an American travel writer I was a little complicit in Trump's insolence. Though I'd visited 30-odd countries, I'd never been to Haiti or El Salvador, and my travels in Africa had been tentative, cautious. The president had denigrated places that even I deemed too broken for tourism. As he often does, he'd stirred the pot with an assertion rooted not in facts, but in something deeper: a widely held fear.
