WASHINGTON — Facing criticism for rising costs for American consumers under his administration, President Donald Trump stoked fear of immigrants from poor countries to rally a crowd of his supporters at a Pennsylvania casino on Tuesday.

In a speech that the White House billed as an address on the economy, amid a backlash driven in part by Trump’s sweeping tariffs, Trump veered between assurances that life was better than ever under his administration and blaming immigrants for the country’s economic woes.

Trump revived what had been an effective campaign message, promising that sending immigrants home would mean “more jobs, better wages and higher income for American citizens,” though the early stages of his mass deportation campaign have coincided with widespread economic anxiety.

He earned raucous cheers from his supporters as he spoke of “reverse migration” and trumpeted what he called a “permanent pause” on immigration from “hellholes like Afghanistan, Haiti, Somalia and many other countries.”

Soon after, a member of the crowd yelled out a crude term that Trump used during his first administration to disparage Haiti and some nations in Africa. The president laughed.

“I didn’t say ‘shithole,’ you did!” Trump replied with a grin. He then recounted his use of the term at a White House meeting in 2018 to describe countries that he was balking at accepting immigrants from. Trump had then denied saying that after it was publicly reported. Nearly six years later, he appeared proud of the remark.

Throughout the speech, Trump doubled down on a barrage of incendiary attacks that he has unleashed against immigrants since the shooting of two National Guard members near the White House last month. The day after the shooting, Trump floated the possibility of stripping naturalized American citizens of their citizenship (which is only done in rare cases) and vowed to deport all immigrants that he saw as “non-compatible with Western civilization.”

During his xenophobic tirade, Trump made little distinction between migrants without legal status and those who followed all the correct procedures to enter the country and eventually become American citizens. He described Somali immigrants as lazy, murderous and “garbage,” and said the home countries of many immigrants were “filthy, dirty, disgusting.”

He singled out Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., referring to her hijab as “the little turban.” He again called for her to be deported, and the crowd responded by chanting, “Send her back.”

“She comes in, does nothing but bitch,” Trump said. “She is always complaining. She comes from her country where, I mean it’s considered about the worst country in the world.”

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Chris Cameron/Doug Mills
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