Stephen L. Carter, Columnist

What If Trump Was Misheard? Some Options

Maybe the president doesn't want immigrants from "little" countries. Or "simple" ones.

January 12, 2018 at 5:44 PM UTC

Stephen L. Carter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, a professor of law at Yale University and author of “Invisible: The Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America’s Most Powerful Mobster.”

Tomayto, tomahto.
Photographer: Martin H. Simon/Bloomberg

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Okay, I’ll play. President Donald Trump has denied using nasty, vulgar language at a meeting Thursday with lawmakers to discuss immigration reform. He supposedly referred to African countries and Haiti with a word that’s usually unprintable, but which we’ll get to in a moment. And in Trump’s usual graceless way, he proposed more immigrants from Norway.

What was the word? Well, I won’t quote it here, but if you’re reading this, you’ve already heard. Although news outlets chose various ways to handle what Trump said to the lawmakers, no one felt free to ignore it. One can hardly blame them.