On Tuesday, Department of Homeland Security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen had the profound misfortune of having a regularly scheduled DHS oversight hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee fall only a few days after she attended an immigration-reform meeting in which her boss, Donald Trump, chose to display his white-supremacist beliefs more unapologetically than ever. In an even less lucky turn of events, Illinois senator Dick Durbin—another one of the individuals in the room, who had confirmed reports that the president described African countries and Haiti as "shitholes," and who has since been labeled a liar by Trump—happens to sit on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Worst of all, Nielsen, like everyone who appears before a Senate committee, had to deliver her testimony under oath.

The ensuing exchanges were hard to watch. Nielsen came prepared with a laundry list of disingenuous euphemisms for "racism," alternately describing the president's words as "tough," "rough," "strong," and "cuss words." When pressed about Trump's use of vulgarity, she responded by presenting a thorough overview of the policy argument that Trump, in her view, had attempted to make. "The concept and the context, I believe, in which this came up was the concept that the president would like to move to a merit-based [immigration] system," she explained, to which Vermont senator Patrick Leahy responded by dryly noting that the quality of "being from Norway" is not, in fact, a skill.

In a remarkable coincidence, Nielsen's impressively detailed memory of last week's events did not extend to whether the president had, in fact, characterized dozens of countries with predominantly non-white populations as "shitholes." She told Leahy that she did not "recall" Trump using that specific word, but when asked if he had used a substantially derogatory word, Nielsen pivoted hard enough to blow out a knee. "The conversation was very impassioned," she said, referring to an overtly racist remark that she did not deny took place. "I don't dispute that the president used tough language, and others in the room were also using tough language." This attempt at both-sidesing did not sit well with Durbin, who stretched his allotted time for questioning into what must have felt, to Nielsen, like a lifetime.

DURBIN: Did you hear me use profanity?