US President Donald Trump vehemently denied on Sunday that he was a racist, after his vulgar disparagement of African countries and Haiti complicated a bipartisan deal on immigration.
“I’m not a racist. I am the least racist person you have ever interviewed,” Trump told reporters at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, where he was having dinner with Republican House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy.
Trump appeared to give up for dead an immigration deal, coming back on the issue in a pair of early morning tweets three days after reportedly referring to African and Haitian immigrants as coming from “(offensive word) countries,” triggering global condemnation.
“I think this man, this president, is taking us back to another place,” John Lewis, a Georgia congressman who was on the front lines of the 1960s civil rights movement, said Sunday on ABC’s ‘This Week’. “I think he is a racist.”
Senator David Purdue, a Republican from Georgia, called charges that Trump is racist “ridiculous” and his reported remarks a “gross misrepresentation” of the White House meeting on immigration.
But other Republicans, pained by the turn of events, spoke out against the president as debate over the slur spilled into Sunday television talk shows.
“I can’t defend the indefensible,” said Mia Love, a Haitian-American congresswoman from Utah who campaigned on Trump’s behalf in the country’s Haitian community. “I still think that he should apologise,” she said on CNN’s ‘State of the Union’.
“I think that there are people that are looking for an apology. And I think that that would show real leadership.”
Trump’s remarks were confirmed by Senator Dick Durbin, a Democrat who attended the White House meeting, after it was reported by The Washington Post and other media.
But Trump has stuck with a vague denial that he used such language, and so far has made no move to apologise, hurting prospects for a deal on DACA and making life uncomfortable for Republicans as they look ahead to midterm elections this year.
The president sought to shift from the defensive by portraying Democrats as not truly interested in an immigration deal.
“They just want to talk and take desperately needed money away from our Military,” he tweeted.
“I, as president, want people coming into our Country who are going to help us become strong and great again, people coming in through a system based on MERIT. No more Lotteries! #AMERICA FIRST.”
Donald Trump
