After 36 consecutive hours of performative handwringing over Michelle Wolf's monologue from White House reporters whose livelihoods depend on currying favor with the administration, Donald Trump held a joint press conference with Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari on Monday afternoon. The visit was Trump's first with the president of an sub-Saharan African nation since he took office over a year ago, which also made it the first since he referred to the continent as a collection of "shithole" countries and complained that Nigerians immigrants would never "go back to their huts" after being allowed into the United States.

When asked by The Hill's Jordan Fabian if the two men had discussed in private this evidence of the president's casual white supremacy, Buhari politely demurred, stating that because he was not in the room, he cannot know whether those reports are true. "The best thing," he concluded, chuckling a little, "is for me to keep quiet." As Buhari trailed off, his counterpart jumped in and offered a new implicit defense of his old explicit racism: It's not important anymore—but also, he was on to something when he said it in the first place.

We didn’t discuss it. And you do have some countries that are in very bad shape and very tough places to live in, but we didn’t discuss it because the president knows me and he knows where I’m coming from, and I appreciate that. We didn’t discuss it.

Trump went on to assert that he would "very much like to visit" Nigeria, which he called an "amazing" and "beautiful" country—neither of which, presumably, were words that made their way into his prior effort at description. The president also refused to disavow his pre-election calls for a total Muslim ban, which the Supreme Court has hinted present a significant barrier to the travel ban's constitutionality. "There's no reason to apologize," he said, standing next to the leader of a country that tens of millions of Muslims call home. "Our immigration laws in this country are a total disaster. There’s nothing to apologize for."

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