Definitely not a shithole country… https://t.co/C31HB3LzfU
— Matt Gaetz (@mattgaetz) October 18, 2021
Totally dunked on them, right? Millions of Haitians definitely saw this tweet and said to each other “Wow, we got shaded so badly by sex god Congressman Matt Gaetz. Damn. He really showed us.”
Thing is though is that Haiti is kind of a shithole. It’s a poverty stricken third world country whose government does effectively nothing to serve its people and exists solely to enrich those who buy their way into it (kind of like the government Republicans want to create here in the US).
But that’s not exactly the context calling the place a “shithole” came from, as in January 2018 it was widely reported that Former President Trump asked out loud in a private meeting with Senate leadership why America would want immigrants from “all these shithole countries” such as Haiti, El Salvador, and African nations and also why we couldn’t take more people from places like Norway instead. Meaning Trump didn’t really care so much about the conditions that most people in those countries live in every day, he just said those conditions make them unworthy of being granted the right to live in the United States – in contrast to Norwegians whom, by pretty much every global quality of life index measure we have available, enjoy a higher standard of living than Americans do.
And Norwegians are 90% white too. That probably helped. Trump could’ve just said “I don’t want brown immigrants, I want white ones” and that would’ve made this easier. Gaetz also could’ve tweeted “Hahahaha, look at that majority Black country! They suck at public safety!” rather than necessitating this long explainer about why the term “shithole” is a MAGA shibboleth for their panic over a third world invasion and not an indelicate but fair assessment of the current state of governance in Haiti, which is actually an excellent reason to welcome them to build new lives here.