Donald Trump’s interview with Sean Hannity on Thursday night took a racist turn when he began fear-mongering about Haitian immigrants coming into the United States claiming they “probably have AIDS.”
In a phone interview, Hannity asked the former president if migrants entering the country should at least have a COVID test and a “health check.”
“So, we have hundreds of thousands of people flowing in from Haiti. Haiti has a tremendous AIDS problem. AIDS is a step beyond. AIDS is a real bad problem,” Trump said. “So hundreds of thousands of people are coming into our country and if you look at the stats and you look at the numbers, if you look at just – take a look at what’s happening in Haiti, a tremendous problem with AIDS. Many of those people will probably have AIDS and they’re coming into our country. We don’t do anything about it. We let everybody come in. It’s like a death wish, like a death wish for our country!”
This is not the first time Trump demeans Haitians immigrants by claiming they have AIDS. During an Oval Office meeting in June 2017 Trump reportedly told top administration officials that people coming from Haiti “all have AIDS,” after viewing a list of how many immigrants were given visas to enter the country that year.
White House press secretary Sarah Sanders pushed back at the report denying that Trump made those comments and blasted the New York Times for printing “the lies of their anonymous ‘sources.'”
