Trump resumes his xenophobic attacks, singling out non-white immigrants in his latest remarks

In 2018, Donald Trump denied using the slur “shithole” to describe countries whose citizens migrate to the United States. Today, he openly embraces the term and has escalated his anti-immigrant, xenophobic rhetoric even further.

At a Pennsylvania rally on Wednesday—an event billed as an economic policy speech—the 79-year-old Republican again used the phrase that caused outrage during his first term. “We had a meeting and I said, ‘Why is it we only take people from shithole countries? Why can’t we have people from Norway, Sweden?’” he told supporters. He went on to attack Somalia, calling it “filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime,” and has recently referred to Somali immigrants as “trash.”

Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey condemned the remarks on X, calling them further proof of Trump’s “racist, anti-immigrant agenda.”
Florida Republican Randy Fine, however, defended Trump, arguing on CNN that “not all cultures are equal,” and that Trump “speaks in language that Americans understand.”

Carl Bon Tempo, a history professor at the University of Albany, said such rhetoric has long existed on the far right. “The difference now is that it’s coming directly from the White House,” he noted, adding that no political platform is larger.

Trump has made similar statements before. On the 2023 campaign trail, he claimed immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country,” a remark widely compared to Adolf Hitler. Now back in office, his administration has rolled out an aggressive deportation drive and halted immigration applications from nationals of 19 of the world’s poorest countries, while simultaneously fast-tracking white South African farmers, citing their alleged persecution.

Terri Givens, an immigration policy expert at the University of British Columbia, said Trump has “lost whatever filter he might once have had.” Syracuse University political scientist Mark Brockway added that, under Trump, even long-established, law-abiding immigrants are vilified as part of an invented enemy.

Recent comments from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who labeled some migrants “killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies,” illustrate how the administration has shifted public frustration over rising living costs and job insecurity onto immigrants.

Bon Tempo noted that immigration debates often flare not only because of economic pressures but also because they tap into deeper questions about American identity.

After an Afghan national assaulted two National Guard soldiers in Washington on November 28, Trump demanded “REVERSE MIGRATION” on Truth Social—a concept rooted in far-right European ideologies advocating mass expulsions of immigrants deemed unable to assimilate.

Experts say Trump’s worldview echoes early 20th-century “nativist” politics that saw white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant culture as the core of American identity and shaped immigration policies favoring Northern and Western Europeans.

As White House advisor Stephen Miller recently wrote on X: “Mass migration doesn’t just import individuals—it imports societies. At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.”