Presented entirely without comment: the US Secretary of Homeland Security has said that if Trump and his proposed immigration policies are “racist“, then that makes Malcolm Turnbull racist too.
In an interview on Fox News on Sunday night, Kirstjen Nielsen pushed back against allegations that Trump is racist, amid backlash over Trump’s alleged comments about having to take immigrants from “shithole countries” when speaking about Haiti, El Salvador and some African countries:
I take a little bit of offence to the comments and suggestions that the president is racist. I’m sure that we are not, any of us, suggesting that Canada and Australia and their leaders are racists.
Nielsen characterised Trump’s immigration policy as moving away from a country-based quota system towards a ‘merit-based’ system, similar to the ones used here and in Canada.
Trump defended his comments, telling reporters “I’m not a racist. I am the least racist person you have ever interviewed. That I can tell you.” I mean, I personally would assume that the least racist person they’d ever interviewed maybe didn’t refuse to rent apartments to black people or ask why Japan, a country of “samurai warriors“, did not simply shoot down the North Korean missiles. But, hey, maybe they mostly just interview really racist people.
