So on Thursday the nation went through its usual daily ritual,
briefly unfurling from the fetal position just
long enough to turn on the news and see
what our national embarrassment has done to disgrace us.
So how did that go? - Good evening.
The president of the United States
is tired of so many black people coming to this country, tired
of immigrants from Haiti and Africa being allowed in.
Quote, "Why are we having all these people
from shithole countries come here,"
the president said today at the White House.
Wow, that is news.
The president was actually at the White House for once?
Probably because Mar-a-Lago is overrun
with his Haitian employees.
Of course Republicans sprang into action
with the best defense of Trump they could
think of, half-assed denials.
My understanding, on the basis of a very good source,
he didn't say S-hole.
He said S-house.
Ho ho, very clever, the old, I didn't call your mother a slut,
I called her a whore defense.
Other Trump toadies offered a different
but equally persuasive excuse.
Some White House officials were
telling reporters, dismissing this as kitchen table talk.
Sure, kitchen table talk.
I mean, who doesn't love talking about shitholes
over their beef stew, beans, and chocolate ice cream?
Thankfully a few Republicans were bold enough
to stand up to Trump.
Fellow South Carolina senator Tim Scott
said Graham told him reports of the comments
were basically accurate.
I can't defend the indefensible.
Were the comments racist do you think?
Well, I think they were, yes.
That's so strange.
These two Republicans criticize Trump while these two
denied he even made the remark.
If only there were some sort of pattern
that might explain the difference.
I guess we'll never know.
Trump shithole talk has prompted the media
to once again ask the question that
has mystified them for years.
Is Donald Trump racist?
Is he a racist?
Do you think this president is racist?
Do you think he himself is racist?
Do you think he's a racist?
Do you believe he's a racist?
Is President Trump a racist?
It's like Maya Angelou once said, when someone tells you
who they are, ignore it, elect them president,
and then spend 24 hours a day asking
each other if you believe what they told you about themselves.
[APPLAUSE]
Is Trump racist appears to be the great unsolved mystery
of our time.
It's today's Watergate, if Nixon had repeatedly
stuck his head out the window and screamed,
"I did Watergate!"
To settle the matter once and for all,
I asked my intrepid staff to use their crack
investigative skills to blow the lid
off the question plaguing journalists and politicians
across the nation.
NARRATOR: Tonight, "Full Frontal" investigates,
is this racist racist, a 45 part series.
After exhaustive research we have unearthed trace evidence
that our president is racist.
Exhibit A, everything Trump has said since he took office.
But you also had people that were very
fine people, on both sides.
Are you going to include the Congressional Black Caucus?
- Are they friends of yours? - I'm just a reporter.
Set up the meeting.
He said that all Haitians have AIDS
and he talked about everybody from Nigeria
basically living in huts.
REPORTER: A member related to President Trump
that potential welfare cuts would harm her constituents,
not all of whom are black.
The president replied, really?
Then what are they?
Trump has done so many racist things
it's impossible to remember them all.
You can tell me he put an assortment
of anti-Semitic breakfast cereals on the Mar-a-Lago menu
and I'd have to pause for a second
to think about whether or not that actually happened.
Gestap-Os, the final solution to your hunger.
But this racist white rabbit hole goes deeper my friends.
Utilizing our exclusive source--
code name, national television-- we obtained
widely seen footage of Trump acting outrageously racist
before the election.
They're bringing drugs.
They're bringing crime.
They're rapists.
Countless Americans are killed by illegal immigrants.
We have to look at the Muslims.
We have to look at the mosques.
Look at my African-American.
You take a look at the inner cities,
you get shot walking down the street.
He's a Mexican.
We're building a wall between here and Mexico.
We're going to get them the hell out of our country.
All right, and I don't mind that.
They shouldn't be here in the first place.
Still so ambiguous.
But you guys aren't going to believe it,
this thing goes all the way to the bottom.
We kept digging and discovered video of Trump
when he was just a super-racist private citizen disparaging
minorities that has never before been seen,
except by everyone because it was totally public
and always has been.
I don't want to jump to conclusions,
but we might be onto something that we've
been saying since day one.
If you look at some of the reservations
that you've approved, they don't look like Indians to me.
REPORTER: He took out a full-page ad after the Central
Park jogger case.
If the woman died, I think they should be executed.
I think you should have the death penalty.
REPORTER: The Department of Justice took notice in 1973.
Trump management was charged with discriminating
against African-Americans.
Jesus, how racist do you have to be
for the Nixon administration to say whoa, dial it back?
So there we have it friends.
Trump wasn't just an innocent birther.
He's a racist.
This is breaking news, I guess, because I've said
it so many times I'm broken.
Please, give me a Pulitzer.
Make sure Meryl plays me in the movie
and don't use the euphemism racial charged ever again.
Stop acting shocked about it and start
grappling with what it means.
Donald Trump hates black and brown people
and he's in charge of a lot of their lives.
When he called Haiti and Honduras shithole countries,
he killed an immigration bill intended
to avoid government shutdown.
The bipartisan bill he rejected in that meeting
provides protections for Dreamers.
It funds border security, which Trump claims to want.
It ends the diversity lottery but uses those spots
for people from the most vulnerable countries,
such as Haiti and Honduras.
It's a compromise, but it would have helped a lot of people.
And Trump killed it, not because he thinks he has a better plan
or even because he wants more money
for his stupid fucking wall.
He rejected it because he wanted it to include
fewer nonwhite shithole people.
He said so.
Hundreds of thousands of families
will be torn apart because the president
thinks they're shitholes.
So yeah, whatever, Trump is racist.
Let's try to hold that in our heads for good this time.
I think we might actually manage it.
This is CNN tonight.
I'm Don Lemon.
The president of the United States is racist.
Don Lemon scooped my story.
We'll be right back.