At a Trump Georgia rally on Saturday, October 24, Donald Trump called Libya, Yemen, Haiti and Somalia “terror infested” before labeling them “[expletive] countries,” and the crowd answered with laughter and applause.
Video:
Trump was speaking at Guardian Centers in Perry, Georgia, when he brought up the four nations. “Terror infested countries like Libya, Yemen, Haiti, Somalia… remember what I called them? [Expletive] countries,” Trump said. Then he leaned into it. “Remember the heat I took? Remember the heat I took from the Democrats? I remember, those sleazy guys.”
The line is a callback to one of the most condemned moments of his first term. In January 2018, during a White House meeting with lawmakers about immigration, Trump reportedly questioned why the United States should take in people from Haiti and African nations, calling them “[expletive] countries.” The comment drew outrage at home and abroad. Trump denied using that language at the time.
He did not even get his own insult right on Saturday. The word reported in 2018 ended in “hole.” In Georgia, he said “house.”
This is not the first time he has walked back the denial. At a December 2025 rally in Pennsylvania, Trump confirmed he had used the phrase, nearly eight years after saying he never did. The Trump Georgia rally went a step further, turning the insult into an applause line and framing the backlash as something Democrats put him through.
The countries he named are not interchangeable. Haiti is a majority Black Caribbean nation and the first independent Black republic in the world, born from a revolution against slavery in 1804. Large Haitian communities live in Miami, New York and Boston. Somalia sits in East Africa, and Somali Americans have built communities in Minneapolis and Columbus, Ohio. Libya is in North Africa, and Yemen is on the Arabian Peninsula.
Haitians in particular have been a repeated target of Trump’s rhetoric. During a September 2024 presidential debate, he repeated a claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating residents’ pets, a claim local officials said they had no evidence to support.
Saturday’s remarks came with the midterm elections less than two weeks away, and the Trump Georgia rally crowd made clear the line still lands with his base.
