Booker: Trump’s comment ‘gut-churning’

Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) blasted President Trump’s reported comments calling African nations “shithole countries,” dubbing them “gut-churning” in a new interview. 

“That’s the thing that is just so gut-churning to these kind of words that can come out from the president,” Booker told CNN’s Chris Cuomo late Tuesday.  

“It’s not the vulgarity. It’s definitely not the vulgarity. It’s the bigotry and the discrimination that comes from the mouth of the president that, in our climate today, causes damage,” he continued. 

{mosads}Trump reportedly made the comments in an Oval Office meeting on immigration last week with a bipartisan group of lawmakers. 

Booker delivered an impassioned rebuke of the president’s comments earlier Tuesday while criticizing Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen after she said she did not hear the president use the term “shithole countries.”

“When ignorance and bigotry is allied with power, it’s a dangerous force in our country. Your silence and your amnesia is complicity,” Booker told Nielsen during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. 

Nielsen said during the hearing that is was “possible” Trump used vulgar language during the meeting last week, but that she did not hear him use the term.

“It was a meeting of 12 people. There was cross-talk,” she said. “Anything is possible. I can’t testify to what I don’t know.”