Trump once shared his bigoted views with us in private. Now there's no hiding it.

The president's "shithole countries" comment at a rally proved that he's being lying to the public for years.

I will never forget the afternoon in the Oval Office when Donald Trump slipped into a high-pitched voice and faked a bad Mexican accent, pretending to be a migrant woman begging for help. It was a moment that previewed the man whom we saw speaking last night in Pennsylvania.

Before getting to what happened at his speech last night, let me take you back to that moment in March of 2019. The first few months of that year, when I was serving as chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security, it felt like almost every day we were being forcibly summoned to the White House. That afternoon was no different.

The president was angry.

He was angry that we’d said “no” to impulsive ideas for punishing migrants, from snake-filled moats to tear-gas attacks.

He was angry that he couldn’t repel the “invaders” by having the military shoot them, as women and children walked toward the border unarmed.

He was angry that he couldn’t just wave a magic wand and seal the entire U.S. Southern Border, lining it end to end with U.S. troops and keeping out all people, all commerce — everything — and then implementing what sounded an awful lot like a race-based immigration policy for the rest of the world, limiting U.S. admissions to people from his favorite countries.

Just. Shut. It. All. Down. That’s what he wanted.

After years in office, Donald Trump still didn’t fully understand why he needed Congress in order to solve the immigration crisis once and for all. DHS didn’t have unlimited authority to do whatever it wanted. There were laws and a Constitution to abide. But Trump didn’t care.

On this particular day in March, it was clear he was mentally spiraling.

Red-faced and shouting, he told us he’d had enough. He ticked off a litany of grievances about his job and the pressures he was under. On immigration, he said, DHS was standing in his way. Trump was sick of being told “no.” I sat there on the couch in front of the Resolute Desk as he berated us, a small group of senior officials who’d been summoned for another tongue lashing. Why was the department stonewalling all of his requests? Why wouldn’t we just do what he wanted? He scanned our faces. Demanding answers. We said nothing.

These were rhetorical questions, of course. We didn’t need to repeat ourselves. We’d told the president — many, many times — that many of the actions he wanted to take were illegal. He knew what his real options were. He just didn’t like them.

At one point, the president spelled out in plain words exactly the type of people he was tired of seeing enter the United States.

“Now we just get these women coming in with seven children,” he said, drawing his shoulders together and making himself look meek, as if he were one of them. He slipped into a high-pitched voice — a Mexican accent. “Oh, my husband, he left me!” he said, making a pouty face and pleading like he was an imaginary migrant woman seeking asylum.

Then he straightened himself and waved his hand dismissively.

“They are useless,” Trump spat. “They don’t do anything for our country.”

He thought for a beat and amended his statement, noting that it would be better if those women showed up with men at their side.

“At least if they came in with a husband, we could put him in the fields to pick corn or something.”

It wasn’t the first time he’d acted like this, oozing with racial contempt and performing it for the room. But for me it was the most memorable. If we didn’t do something about people like this, he continued, then he’d look weak politically. Immigration was his signature issue.

“Close the border, and they’ll kiss our asses!” he barked. “These countries are horrible. They are — I’ve used a term before, you know the term.”

He said it like it was an inside joke. The president was alluding to his controversial “shithole countries” comment without saying it. The year before, he’d reportedly used the term in a meeting with lawmakers when disparaging Haiti and African nations. When it leaked, he denied it and White House staff did the same, deriding it as “fake news,” as if the president never said such things. Personally, I’d gotten used to him using the term “hellholes” in private when referring to these places, particularly nations in Latin America or Africa.

Regardless, everyone sitting there in the Oval Office knew exactly what he meant.

Trump complained once more that the troops he’d sent to the Southern Border were ineffective. They needed to be able to use deadly force.

“But we can’t do that,” he said ruefully as an afterthought, recalling that those of us leading his teams at DHS and the Pentagon had repeatedly told him to stop talking about shooting migrants.

At this point, Donald Trump scanned the room, seemingly self-aware of his impolitic tirade. His eyes stopped at me.

“What the fuck are you doing?” he asked.

“Excuse me, sir?” I replied.

“You’re taking notes! I don’t want any fucking notes. Stop taking notes.”

I slowly closed my legal pad and sat there, hands folded on top.

This is what you did in meetings with the president. You took notes so that you could capture his directives clearly, get guidance afterward on implementing them, and follow back up with the president. But Trump didn’t like third-party note-taking. Indeed, it limited his ability to deny things he’d done and said.

In the years afterward, I shared episodes like this with others. Why? Because I felt that it was important for Americans to understand how their president actually viewed the world, especially if he lied to the public about it. The implications for U.S. policy and national security were vast. Over and over again in meetings, Trump sorted the world into two piles. The “shitty” countries he wanted to block — like Somalia, Haiti, Ethiopia. And the countries he wanted to welcome more people from — like Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden.

It was impossible not to see the pattern. He didn’t want brown people coming to America. But fair-skinned, blonde people? Very much so.

When I later described meetings like this, on the record, the White House went to war to discredit me. Trump called my accounts of his conduct “phony,” “made up,” “make-believe.” His spokesman said I was a “lying sack of shit.” Another official called it “complete fiction.” Trump himself went further, at one point saying that “there should be major criminal liability for scum like this!”

For years, they insisted I fabricated it all.

Last night, Donald Trump showed the country that I was telling the truth.

Onstage in Pennsylvania, during a rally that spiraled into racist taunts, conspiracy theories, and economic falsehoods, Trump casually resurrected the very remark he once swore he never made. Apparently recounting that controversial Oval Office meeting, he told the crowd how he’d once asked why the United States takes people from “shithole countries” instead of places like Norway or Sweden.

“We had a meeting and I said, ‘Why is it we only take people from shithole countries, right?”

The remark was met with cheers and laughter.

“Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden, just a few. Let us have a few. From Denmark … 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.”

Seven years ago, such words sparked global outrage. African governments summoned U.S. ambassadors. Lawmakers issued statements of condemnation. And naturally, Trump denied it at all. Last night was different. He seemed to delight in the realization that he’s in a different moment than he was seven years ago… a moment when it seems like the world is too exhausted by his controversies to even raise a finger… and when his bigotry can be shared openly and met with little-to-no resistance.

Donald Trump knows we’re morally exhausted. And he relishes it.

The rest of the rally made clear this wasn’t an isolated moment. He mocked Rep. Ilhan Omar’s name and appearance. The crowd chanted “Send her back.” He invoked “remigration,” a term lifted directly from European white nationalist movements that advocate mass ethnic cleansing through deportation. And on, and on.

For years, Trump has operated in two modes: private and public. In private, as I recall, he spoke without restraint and expressed a worldview that was xenophobic to its very core. In public, he relied on denial, euphemism, and strategic ambiguity to activate the audiences who were receptive to that bigotry — but to deny it in front of others who were not.

Last night, those two personas finally merged. The “behind-closed-doors” Trump is now the “on-stage” Trump.

And that matters, because the language has always been the policy. You cannot systematically target majority-Black and Muslim countries for exclusion from America without first convincing your audience that those places are “filthy” and “disgusting.” You cannot normalize mass deportation without framing entire populations as contaminants. What’s more, you cannot argue for “reverse migration” without first convincing people that America is being polluted by “scum” and “trash.”

Mainstream Trump supporters have clung to the idea that his racism has been inflated by critics or distorted by enemies. Hell, I even shared that view at one point. Before I entered the Trump administration and saw it firsthand, I thought that the man’s purported racism must be an exaggeration. But last night, the president personally removed that last refuge and any doubt. He authenticated himself.

Years from now, history will not debate whether Donald Trump harbored bigoted views. He settled that question in his own voice. The only question that will remain is whether the American people — with eyes fully open — let such a man define them. And on that account, the jury is still out.

Your friend, in defiance,

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