Pattern of Racist and Racially Charged Statements: From Birtherism to 'Shithole Countries' to 'Go Back Where You Came From'
Tier 3Ongoing2011-03-01 to 2026-04-09
Factual Summary
Over the course of his public career and political campaigns, Donald Trump has made a series of statements that have been widely characterized as racist or racially charged. Each statement documented here was made on the record, in public settings, and is preserved in video, audio, or confirmed contemporaneous reporting. The statements form a pattern that spans more than a decade and targets multiple racial and ethnic groups.
Trump launched his national political profile in 2011 by promoting the conspiracy theory that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States and was therefore an illegitimate president. Trump demanded that Obama produce his birth certificate and publicly questioned whether Obama had been born in Kenya. This "birther" movement had racial dimensions that were widely noted at the time: no white president had been subjected to comparable challenges to their citizenship. Obama released his long-form birth certificate in April 2011. Trump did not formally acknowledge that Obama was born in the United States until September 2016, during his presidential campaign, and did so in a brief statement without apology for five years of false claims.
On June 16, 2015, in the speech announcing his presidential candidacy, Trump stated of Mexican immigrants: "They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people." The characterization of Mexican immigrants broadly as criminals and rapists was condemned by Latino advocacy organizations and members of both political parties.
In August 2017, following a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a counter-protester, Heather Heyer, was killed when a self-described neo-Nazi drove his car into a crowd, Trump stated that there were "very fine people on both sides." While Trump added that he was "not talking about the neo-Nazis and white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally," the framing of moral equivalence between white supremacist marchers and those protesting against them drew widespread condemnation. The Charlottesville response is documented in greater detail in INCITE-001.
In January 2018, during an Oval Office meeting with lawmakers about immigration, Trump asked why the United States was accepting immigrants from "shithole countries," referring to Haiti, El Salvador, and African nations, and suggested the U.S. should accept more immigrants from countries like Norway. The remarks were reported by multiple participants in the meeting and confirmed by Senator Dick Durbin. Trump initially denied using the exact phrase but later acknowledged he had used "tough" language.
In July 2019, Trump tweeted that four Democratic congresswomen of color, Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib, should "go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came." Three of the four congresswomen were born in the United States. The fourth, Omar, became a U.S. citizen as a teenager. The House of Representatives passed a resolution condemning the tweets as racist, with four Republican members voting in favor.
Trump repeatedly referred to Senator Elizabeth Warren as "Pocahontas," using the name of a historical Native American figure as a derisive nickname in response to Warren's claims of Native American ancestry. Trump used the nickname at a November 2017 White House event honoring Navajo Code Talkers, World War II veterans who used the Navajo language to create an unbreakable military code. The National Congress of American Indians condemned Trump's use of the name as a slur that demeaned Native Americans.
In 1989, Trump took out full-page advertisements in four New York City newspapers calling for the reinstatement of the death penalty in response to the Central Park jogger case, in which five Black and Latino teenagers were accused of rape. The five, who became known as the Central Park Five, were convicted but later fully exonerated in 2002 after another man confessed to the crime and DNA evidence confirmed his guilt. Trump never apologized for the advertisements and stated as recently as 2019 that the five were guilty, despite their exoneration.
During the 2024 presidential campaign and into his second term, Trump stated that immigrants were "poisoning the blood of our country," language that historians noted echoed rhetoric used by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf.
Primary Sources
1. Trump presidential candidacy announcement speech, June 16, 2015 (video and transcript)
2. Trump press conference on Charlottesville, August 15, 2017 (video and transcript)
3. Senator Dick Durbin confirmation of "shithole countries" remarks, January 2018
4. Trump tweets directed at Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, Pressley, and Tlaib, July 14, 2019
5. House Resolution condemning Trump's tweets as racist, July 16, 2019
6. Trump full-page advertisements calling for death penalty in Central Park Five case, May 1, 1989 (reproduced on DocumentCloud)
7. Trump remarks at Navajo Code Talkers event referencing "Pocahontas," November 27, 2017
Corroborating Sources
1. NPR: "Is Trump Really That Racist?" October 19, 2020
2. PBS NewsHour: "Trump digs in on tweets telling Democratic lawmakers to 'go back' to their countries," July 2019
3. Al Jazeera: "Global fury over Trump's racist remark on Africa, Haiti," January 12, 2018
4. NPR: "The Central Park Five and Trump, explained," September 2024
5. CBS News: "Trump 'Pocahontas' remark at Navajo Code Talkers event," November 27, 2017
6. Time: "President Trump Played a Key Role in the Central Park Five Case. Here's the Real History," May 2019
Counterarguments and Context
Trump has denied being racist and has pointed to his support among some minority voters, his administration's achievement of historically low Black and Hispanic unemployment rates, and his support for criminal justice reform through the First Step Act as evidence that his record is not anti-minority. His defenders have argued that the "shithole countries" comment, if made, was about immigration policy rather than race, that the "very fine people" remark at Charlottesville has been taken out of context because Trump also condemned neo-Nazis in the same remarks, that calling Warren "Pocahontas" was a criticism of her unsubstantiated ancestry claims rather than a slur against Native Americans, and that the "go back" tweets were directed at the policies of the congresswomen rather than their race or ethnicity. Supporters have also argued that Trump's 2015 comments about Mexican immigrants were referring specifically to undocumented immigrants involved in criminal activity and not to Mexican people broadly, and that the Central Park Five ads reflected legitimate concern about crime in 1989 rather than racial animus. Critics responded that the cumulative pattern of statements targeting Black, Latino, Native American, and Muslim individuals and communities, spanning from the Central Park Five ads through birtherism through the "poisoning the blood" rhetoric, constitutes a documented record of racially charged language that cannot be explained by any single isolated incident or misinterpretation. The House resolution condemning the "go back" tweets as racist passed with bipartisan support, indicating that even some members of Trump's own party found the language racially objectionable.
Author's Note
This entry is classified as Tier 3 because every statement documented here was made on the record and is preserved in video, audio, print, or confirmed by multiple witnesses. The entry documents the pattern of statements across Trump's career rather than a single incident. Some individual incidents, including the Charlottesville response, are documented in greater detail in separate entries. The classification of these statements as racist or racially charged reflects the assessment of the House of Representatives (which passed a resolution using that characterization), civil rights organizations, and historians, as well as the factual content of the statements themselves.