What’s the official record or White House response to reports Trump called African and Haitian countries ‘shithole countries’ on Jan 11 2018?
Executive summary
On Jan. 11, 2018, multiple news outlets reported that President Donald Trump used the phrase “shithole countries” to describe Haiti, El Salvador and African nations during a White House immigration meeting; the White House did not issue a straightforward denial at the time, and the episode produced immediate bipartisan outrage and conflicting accounts from attendees [1] [2] [3]. The administration’s public communications were a mix of denials by the president on Twitter and a White House statement that stopped short of refuting the Washington Post’s reporting, while some Republican senators present offered alternate characterizations of what was said [4] [2] [5].
1. What the contemporaneous reporting says about White House reactions
Within days of the Washington Post’s account, mainstream outlets and aggregators reported that the White House “did not deny” the comment and that a White House statement responding to the Post’s story did not walk back the quoted language, a posture that allowed news organizations to treat the remark as reported by anonymous sources close to the meeting [2] [1]. At the same time, President Trump tweeted that his language had been “tough” but “this was not the language used,” asserting he never used the specific vulgar phrase and claiming his relationship with Haitians was “wonderful,” which created a direct clash between his denials and the Post’s sourcing [4].
2. Conflicting accounts from lawmakers present in the meeting
Lawmakers who were present gave inconsistent descriptions: Sen. Dick Durbin publicly quoted the president as saying African nations were “shitholes” and that he said “We don’t need more Haitians,” while other senators and staff disputed that exact wording—some Republicans later asserted Trump said “shithouse” or that media reports were inaccurate—leaving the on-the-record congressional record fractured and dependent on competing recollections [6] [5]. Those discrepancies were widely reported and used by supporters of both interpretations to bolster their narratives, with some Republican senators offering cautious statements to minimize fallout and others confirming the media’s version as “basically accurate” [6].
3. White House communications strategy and spokespersons’ lines
The White House press operation — including then-press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders — signaled that the president would not apologize for what was characterized as “strong” language, and official statements and press briefings emphasized policy intent rather than directly rebutting the vulgar quotation, a stance seen in contemporaneous reporting as tacit confirmation by omission rather than explicit admission [7] [2]. Coverage at the time noted the administration’s choice to frame the controversy as an attack by political opponents and “fake news” in some public comments, which functioned to redirect attention from the content of the remark to the reliability of the reporting [8].
4. Political and public reactions recorded at the time
Reactions were swift and bipartisan: Democratic caucus leaders condemned the reported remark as “shameful” and “abhorrent,” civil society and international leaders expressed outrage, and media outlets catalogued global responses, showing that the White House posture—denial from the president combined with non-denial from the institution—amplified condemnation and sustained coverage [9] [10] [11]. Coverage also documented how some White House staff calculated that the remark might resonate with the president’s base, revealing an implicit political calculation behind the communications response [2].
5. Subsequent developments and later statements
Years later, reporting in 2025 and 2025 cited in these sources records that Trump gave an account in which he acknowledged asking “why is it we only take people from shithole countries,” and referenced preferring people from Norway and other Scandinavian countries—an account many outlets treated as a confirmation of the substance of the 2018 reports even as the president framed it as commentary on immigration policy rather than an explicit ethnic slur [8] [12]. Those later recountings show the earlier White House posture—tweeted denial by the president and a cautious institutional response—did not extinguish the controversy and that the question of precisely how the language was delivered continued to be litigated in public reporting [5].
Conclusion: What the “official record” amounts to
The official record, as reflected in contemporaneous White House communications, is fragmented: the president publicly denied using that exact phrasing on Twitter while the White House’s formal responses did not categorically refute the Washington Post’s account, and senators’ conflicting on-the-record statements left the factual record contested [4] [2] [6]. Subsequent reporting years later documents the president recounting similar language, which many outlets interpreted as confirmation of the original reports, but the original meeting’s transcript was never released publicly in the sources cited here, so the administration’s mix of denial, non-denial and later statements comprises the practical “official” record available to the public [12] [2].