WASHINGTON, DC – Former U.S. Ambassador Ken Blackwell threw down on MSNBC for Martin Luther King Jr. Day, talking about President Donald Trump, racism, and sh**hole nations.
Blackwell appeared on MSNBC Live with Alex Witt, energetically debating the president’s alleged comment that Haiti and African nations are “shithole countries” and what this says about the president and his views on race. (Both the president and Republicans present at the meeting contest whether that precise term was used.)
Witt tried lecturing Blackwell on how other nations perceive such alleged comments and how it affects America’s standing in the world. He shut her down, reminding her that he had served as the nation’s top human rights official when serving as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Commission and had served under both a Republican president and a Democratic president (George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton).
Blackwell shot back that the president was discussing dysfunctional nations, focusing on the successfulness of those nations, not the skin color of many of the people living there.
“This president has basically said that he wants to secure our borders and wants an immigration policy that’s based on merit,” said Blackwell.
“This president has run and won” on those immigration priorities, he insisted.
Regarding the alleged use of profanity, Blackwell responded that if the president had “said these nation states are dysfunctional, failed states, there would have been little room for debate,” noting that the U.S. Department of State warns Americans not to travel to several of those countries.
“I have worked with presidential administrations since the Reagan years,” Blackwell exclusively told Breitbart News after the MSNBC interview, “and I have heard top national leaders of both political parties use colorful language when behind closed doors to make a point.”
“The press has heard plenty of people — including Democratic presidents — use language that you would not use in church,” he added. “But with this president, they accept the allegations as true, twist it to claim it as proof that he has the worst possible views, and then make it the top of the news to avoid discussing the very serious underlying issue of our immigration policy.”
“America’s great ally, Australia — where I visited just a year ago — and many other first-world countries have immigration policies that consider things like education, job skills, and how you can contribute to their economies,” he continued. “I don’t hear MSNBC calling Australians racist, nor should they.”
“Here is the president trying to discuss concerns about lower-skill immigration levels from dysfunctional states, and rather than treat that as a serious discussion on the need for immigration reform, they make it a racially divisive sideshow,” Blackwell added.
Blackwell explained to Breitbart News that while he may have differed on some political issues, “Martin Luther King Jr. believed that America was one nation under God, that truth — including moral truth — is absolute.”
“Such a moral vision of respecting the God-given dignity of every human being is perfectly consistent with the concept that every nation has a sovereign right to control its own borders and to have an immigration policy that is in the best interests of that nation,” he concluded.
Ken Klukowski is senior legal editor for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @kenklukowski.
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