Trump ramps up anti-immigrant rhetoric, embraces phrase ‘s—hole countries’

(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump ramped up his anti-immigrant rhetoric in a speech on Tuesday night, repeatedly attacking Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar and complaining about immigration outside of Europe.

“Let’s have a few from from Denmark. Do you mind sending us a few people? Send us some nice people. Do you mind? But we always take people from Somalia, places that are a disaster, right? Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime. The only thing they’re good at is going after ships,” Trump said as he addressed supporters in Pennsylvania.

The speech was billed as an event to sell his economic agenda, but quickly devolved into a campaign-style speech filled with derogatory insults.

Trump specifically took aim at Omar, a Somali American who represents Minnesota. He appeared to purposefully mispronounce her name and referred to Omar’s hijab as a turban.

“I love her, she comes in, does nothing but b—-. She’s always complaining. She comes from a country where, I mean, it’s considered about the worst country in the world, right?” Trump said.

“She should get the hell out. Throw her the hell out,” Trump added.

His supporters then launched into “send her back” chants about the congresswoman, who is an American citizen.

Omar responded to the remarks, the latest in Trump’s attacks on her and Somali immigrants, in a post on X late Tuesday.

“Trump’s obsession with me is beyond weird. He needs serious help. Since he has no economic policies to tout, he’s resorting to regurgitating bigoted lies instead. He continues to be a national embarrassment,” she wrote.

Trump admits to saying ‘s—hole countries’

Trump on Tuesday also recalled a 2018 meeting in which he told a group of senators behind closed doors that the U.S. shouldn’t accept immigrants from “s—hole countries” such as Haiti.

When it was reported at the time, Trump himself flatly denied using the expletive.

“Never said anything derogatory about Haitians other than Haiti is, obviously, a very poor troubled country,” Trump wrote on X, then known as Twitter.

ABC News reported that in the 2018 Oval Office meeting with senators, Trump expressed frustration over the visa lottery program and asked those in the room why they would want people from Haiti, Africa and other “s—hole countries” coming into the United States.”

In his denial then, Trump accused Democrats in the meeting of making up comments attributed to him and said that he “probably should record future meetings.” Notably, the president back then did not deny he suggested that America should admit more immigrants from places such as Norway — comments that were confirmed by multiple sources with direct knowledge of the conversations.

But in his speech on Tuesday, Trump embraced the expletive as he boasted about pausing immigration applications from what he called “third-world countries” including “hellholes like Afghanistan, Haiti, Somalia and many other countries.”

Someone in the audience then yelled the word “s—hole.”

“I didn’t say ‘s—hole,’ you did,” Trump quipped. “Remember, I said that to the senators. They came in, the Democrats, they wanted to be bipartisan, so they came in and they said, ‘This is totally off the record, nothing mentioned here, we want to be honest,’ because our country was going to hell.”

“And we had a meeting, and I say, ‘Why is it we only take people from s—hole countries,’ right? Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden? Just a few? Let’s have a few from from Denmark. Do you mind sending us a few people? Send us some nice people. Do you mind? But we always take people from Somalia, places that are a disaster, right? Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime.”

ABC News’ Justin Gomez and Alexandra Hutzler contributed to this report.