Trump’s Derision of Haitians Goes Back Years

“Donald Trump had been in office for less than six months when he made clear his disdain for people from Haiti, offering a revealing prelude to his recent embrace of false rumors about Haitians eating pets in an Ohio town,” the New York Times reports.

“He insisted one afternoon in 2017 that immigrants from Haiti should not be let into the United States, shocking his chief of staff, secretary of state, homeland security secretary and others gathered in the Oval Office by declaring that people from the beleaguered nation ‘all have AIDS.'”

“Now, as he runs for a second term, Mr. Trump is once again denigrating Haitians, part of a pattern that goes back years and appears to have its roots in the early 1980s, when the Centers for Disease Control stigmatized Haitians as a particular threat in the spread of AIDS, driving years of panic about the newly discovered disease.”