Trump’s “tough talk” distracts from the issues

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Trump’s recent comments have many Americans feeling his remarks are beneath the office of the presidency.

Julie Bauer, Staff Writer

At this point, everyone knows about the January 11 White House meeting on immigration. This is the meeting in which President Donald Trump allegedly referred to Haiti, El Salvador, and African countries as “s***hole countries.”

It seems universally agreed upon that Trump used “harsh language.” But what exactly did he say?

There are two main people claiming that Trump said “s***hole.” One is Senator Dick Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois. Durbin was the first to claim that Trump used vulgar language in the meeting. The second is Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina. This senator corroborated Durbin’s claims.

Republican senators Tom Cotton and David Perdue issued a joint statement that they did not recall “the President saying these comments specifically.” According to the Washington Post, however, Cotton and Perdue told the White House that they heard the President say “s***house” instead of “s***hole.” The Washington Post reported this based on accounts from anonymous White House officials.

Trump himself said in a tweet that the language he used at the meeting was “tough,” but that he did not use the vulgarities he had been charged with.

Personally, I don’t find it too outlandish that the President would say something vulgar about these countries, especially given his history of sticking his foot in his mouth.

Either way, many Americans do not have trouble believing Senator Durbin. After the news broke, a trend started where people would leave negative reviews on the Yelp page for Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., calling it a “s***hole.” The average rating for the hotel tanked from four stars to two stars, and the website’s staff is currently working to clean up the influx of fake reviews.

As per usual, he didn’t handle the rumor in the mature way that a world leader should.

“Senator Dicky Durbin totally misrepresented what was said at the DACA meeting,” Trump stated in a January 15th tweet. Mocking a United States senator in such a way might be reasonable for a middle schooler to do, but not a president.

Ultimately, this controversy only distracts from the important issues. What really matters is the meeting’s subject matter– Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. Established in 2012 by the Obama administration, DACA allowed minors who had entered the country illegally to defer their deportation and obtain a work permit. DACA was repealed by the Trump administration in September 2017. This decision hasn’t been fully implemented yet to give Congress time to decide what to do with those who qualify for DACA.

Now that there are hard feelings between the president and the congressmen, negotiations that were difficult to begin with will now be hindered further (see the recent government shutdown). It’s wrong for a president to say something so crude, and we definitely shouldn’t forget, but for the good of the country we should focus on the DACA issue.