President Donald Trump made the racist claim Tuesday that migrant laborers are “naturally” suited to physically arduous farm work — and is being torched on social media as “grotesquely amoral and mindless.”
Trump appeared on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” and was acknowledging that his crackdown on immigration has impacted U.S. agriculture, as much of that workforce is Latino, when he assured viewers that American farmers will get to keep these “very special people.”
“We can’t let our farmers not have anybody,” he said. “You know … these people, you can’t replace them very easily. You know, people that live in the inner city are not doing that work. They’re just not doing that work. And they’ve tried, we’ve tried, everybody tried.”
“These people do it naturally — naturally,” Trump said of the migrant laborers. “I said … to a farmer the other day, ‘What happens if they get a bad back?’ He said, ‘They don’t get a bad back, sir, because if they get a bad back, they die.’ I said that’s interesting, isn’t it?”
“In many ways they’re very, very special people,” the president concluded.
