Patrick Gaspard, the president of Open Society Foundations and former U.S. Ambassador to South Africa, has made multiple media appearances over the past week to discuss the impact of President Trump’s racist and derogatory comments aimed at immigrants and the countries they left.
On MSNBC’s “Hardball with Chris Matthews” (starting at the 1:10 mark), Gaspard, who is Haitian-American, was born in the Congo, and spent much of his career in Africa, said, “This is personal, it strikes right at home.” He described the comments as “reprehensible,” noting that they came just ahead of the eighth anniversary of Haiti’s devastating earthquake, which killed 200,000 people, and Martin Luther King Day.
While Gaspard expressed concern about the consequences of Trump’s comments on U.S. standing in the world, he pointed to the outpouring of support from Americans after the earthquake in Haiti and said he believed that, ultimately, America’s “better angels will prevail.”
Gaspard also appeared on MSNBC’s “Live with Alex Witt” and the roundtable segment on ABC News’ “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.”