WASHINGTON: Critics of the US President Donald Trump, including some in his own Republican Party, took time on Friday blasting the vulgar comments about African countries he made behind closed doors.

“The language used by me at the DACA meeting was tough, but this was not the language used,” Trump insisted in a series of Friday morning tweets, pushing back on some depictions of the meeting.

But Trump and his advisers notably did not dispute the most controversial of his remarks: using the word “shithole” to describe African nations and saying he would prefer immigrants from countries like Norway instead.

Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, the only Democrat in the room, said Trump had indeed said what he was reported to have said.

The remarks, Durbin said, were “vile, hate-filled and clearly racial in their content.”

He said Trump used the most vulgar term “more than once.”

“If that’s not racism, I don’t know how you can define it,” Florida GOP Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen told WPLG-TV in Miami.

Tweeted Republican Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona: “The words used by the president, as related to me directly following the meeting by those in attendance, were not ‘tough,’ they were abhorrent and repulsive.”

Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, called the comments “beneath the dignity of the presidency” and said Trump’s desire to see more immigrants from countries like Norway was “an effort to set this country back generations by promoting a homogenous, white society.”

Republican leaders were largely silent, though House Speaker Paul Ryan said the vulgar language was “very unfortunate, unhelpful.”

Trump’s insults - along with his rejection of the bipartisan immigration deal that six senators had drafted - also threatened to further complicate efforts to extend protections for hundreds of thousands of young immigrants, many of whom were brought to this country as children and now are here illegally.

Trump last year ended the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals programme, which provided protection from deportation along with the ability to work legally in the US He gave Congress until March to come up with a legislative fix.

The three Democratic and three GOP senators who’d struck their proposed deal had been working for months on how to balance those protections with Trump’s demands for border security, an end to a visa lottery aimed at increasing immigrant diversity, and limits to immigrants’ ability to sponsor family members to join them in America.

It’s unclear now how a deal might emerge, and failure could lead to a government shutdown.

Associated Press