The great and unheralded triumph of the Trump Administration is that it has created parity between its politics and its language. Since at least the time of Robert McNamara, the prevailing style of American politics has been to cloak atrocity in euphemism. Clinical language, the belief holds, will balm the troubled citizen’s conscience. That is not our current predicament. Quoting this President in his own words has resulted in the term “pussy” emerging from the side streets of impolite language to mainstream publications and cable-news shows. (Such is Trump’s affection for the word that a glossary of his statements would require two entries for it: “Cruz, Ted is,” and “grab them by the.”) Trump shouted to all who would listen, including an audience at a community college in Iowa, that he would “bomb the shit” out of ISIS. He referred to N.F.L. players as “sons of bitches.” He has uttered profanities more publicly and more prolifically than any of his predecessors. Antonin Scalia derided our “coarsened” society, but rappers are not the ones who caused CNN to have to repeatedly air the vaginal slur on air. The current Commander-in-Chief did that.

So the vulgarity of the word that Trump spoke in a discussion in the Oval Office that referred to African and Central American nations as well as to Haiti—“shithole”—was not its most noteworthy element. In November, the Administration ended provisional residency in the United States for sixty thousand Haitians. It currently plans to expel two hundred thousand Salvadorans. As Sarah Stillman reports in this week’s issue of the magazine, deportation sometimes carries fatal risks for the people being returned, particularly those who are political-asylum seekers. These are not matters to be discussed in the detached, opaque language taught in public-policy graduate schools. The most noteworthy fact about Trump’s term is that its ugliness perfectly parallels the morality of his ideas about immigration. It offers more inadvertent honesty and transparency than he has ever been capable of mustering intentionally. Profanity, meet profane. Fittingly, Trump denied ever making the comment, which should be understood as a sort of id override that is compelled to counteract even honesty of the accidental kind.

Trump reportedly grouped Africans under the scatological banner while lamenting the dearth of Norwegians arriving in the United States. His exasperation with African immigration is particularly jarring, given the high educational achievements of many people coming from that continent. Trump is reported to have said last year that once Nigerians see the United States, they will never “go back to their huts.” Yet Nigerians in this country hold master’s degrees at more than double the rate of white Americans, and doctorates at four times the rate. The Administration has consistently denounced immigration that was not based on “merit,” but, two years ago, the Pew Charitable Trusts reported that one of the biggest problems that African immigrants faced in the United States was finding employment commensurate with their levels of educational achievement.

Among the more curious footnotes to Trump’s Presidency is the provenance of his nativism. He is, as David Klion wrote, a product of Queens, New York, the most ethnically diverse urban area in the United States. (Some experts estimate that as many as eight hundred languages are spoken there.) Trump grew up in Jamaica Estates; I grew up in South Jamaica. There is precisely the same relationship between those two communities that their names would suggest. Trump’s environs were, both literally and socioeconomically, elevated above the surrounding areas. The Queens in which he spent his youth served as a sort of interior suburb of New York City and was, not coincidentally, the second-whitest of the five boroughs, after Staten Island. Such were the racial politics of Queens in that era that, as the historian Martha Biondi points out in “To Stand and Fight,” a history of the civil-rights movement in New York, LaGuardia airport, in northern Queens, enacted a demure form of segregation of black travellers in the fifties. There were no “Colored Only” signs, just tacitly recognized black and white areas in the airport.

The tide of change in the borough came as a product of the Hart-Celler Act, of 1965, which radically changed the composition of American immigration. Beginning in the late sixties, Queens became the destination for successive waves of Brazilian, Colombian, Ecuadorian, Tunisian, Yemeni, Dominican, Indian, and Pakistani immigrants. (White resentment of this shift was embodied in the character of Archie Bunker, in Norman Lear’s “All in the Family.”) Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric around immigration during the campaign was merely the opening front of a much larger offensive against any form of immigration that might result in more of the United States coming to resemble Queens. He obliterated a field of sixteen Republican candidates for President last year, in part, because, while they struggled with the language of white ethnic resentment, he spoke it fluently.

The burgeoning hostility toward immigrants in New York in those years landed with particular weight on Haitians—who, Trump is reported to have said last year, “all have AIDS.” Amid the paranoia of the early AIDS crisis, Haitians were stigmatized as vectors for the disease, and the federal government banned them from donating blood. The fear that a new group will spread disease is a common narrative in the history of American immigration. In this instance, it was conjoined to an irony, in that a good deal of the flight from Haiti during those years was inspired by the brutality of the Duvalier regimes, both of which were supported by the United States.

Both history and irony are lost on the current occupant of the White House. It is nonetheless worth recalling that Haiti was the second colony in the Western Hemisphere to declare independence from Europe. Whereas the Americans rebelled against the comparative abstractions of tax policy and economic interests, Haitians confronted a power that had quite literally enslaved, raped, and murdered them. The disastrous impact of that war on the French economy factored into Napoleon’s decision to sell to Thomas Jefferson the Louisiana Territory, for the fire-sale price of fifteen million dollars. (Fifteen American states were carved in part or in their entirety from that purchase.) The success of the Haitian Revolution, in turn, inspired the United States to abolish the trans-Atlantic slave trade, fearful that there was now a template for successful mass slave revolts. The histories of the United States and Haiti are intricately interwoven.

There have been calls for Trump to apologize, which will be ignored, but they are driven almost entirely by the phrasing of his dismissal, not by the warped, inhumane logic that animates it. He will move on from this moment, meandering toward the same ignoble goal with perhaps more deceptively generic language. Sometimes, the obscenity is not what is truly obscene.