President Donald Trump's comments on Haiti and African countries, which the president denied making, are "terrible," Ohio Gov. John Kasich said Friday, but he refused to call the president a racist over them.
"It's not helpful," Kasich told MSNBC's Hallie Jackson. "It's a terrible comment. Maybe the one good thing was can say, he's trying to say he didn't say it, because he realized it was a big mistake."
However, even though Sen. Dick Durbin and others on Friday accused Trump of making racist comments, when he allegedly referred to Haiti and African nations as being "s***hole countries" during a meeting on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, Kasich would not go that far.
"I don't call names," Kasich, who ran against Trump for the GOP nomination in 2016, told Jackson. "I just don't."
"It's a category, not a name, respectfully, sir," Jackson said.
"It's a name, it's a name," he replied. "I have said what I have to say. I'm not saying any more. Appreciate you letting me come on."
Kasich noted that with Africa, many of the nations are experiencing both growth and problems.
"I have been involved with Africa in helping the countries in Africa for a very long time," he said. "In fact, with Bono, we did debt relief because we think it is important. If you don't have economic growth, you don't feel right with terrorism and we don't want to demean people.
"We are all made in the image of the Lord and don't want to say disparaging things . . . we all make mistakes, but there's no excuse, when you do it, you have to apologize."
Kasich and ex-Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, another GOP candidate in the 2016 race, on Thursday railed in a joint column for The New York Times against the Trump administration's call to end temporary protected status designations for hundreds of thousands of people from El Salvador, who were invited to the United States by former President George W. Bush after a devastating 2001 earthquake.
"But I also wrote about DACA, the young kids brought to the United States, and they live on the edge, on a razor's edge, with the fact they could be shipped out," said Kasich.
He said he agrees that the nation's borders need protected, but advised against "looking in the rear-view mirror to try to fix things that ultimately can divide families."
Kasich said he also thinks Trump need to resolve the DACA issue immediately.
"I guess there was a meeting a couple days ago where the president said, well, let's work this all out," said the governor. "And then there were members of Congress that said,'oh, no, you can't.'
"So left to his own judgment, do I think he might work something out? Yeah, but I'm not sure that — I'm not sure who he's talking to or listening to."
Further, Kasich said he is not confident that a DACA deal will be reached by its March deadline, or "anything in the crazy city right now."
"Everything has become partisan, political," he said. "We went through this on healthcare, and now we're going through it on DACA . . . if we want to stabilize the program, I'm for it. But don't be trying to divide people, people fully integrated into the United States who are law-abiding and constructive, no reason to grab them and ship them out.
"If George W. Bush thought they should stay and Barack Obama thought they should stay, you got a Republican and a Democrat president saying that, no reason to pick on them at this point. "
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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