If President Donald Trump honours a refugee resettlement agreement with Australia, he’s pretty sure the newcomers “are not going to be wonderful people who go on to work for the local milk people.”
That’s what the president told Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull in January, according to reproductions of transcripts published by the Washington Post on Thursday.
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Turnbull had a hard time getting Trump to understand the full parameters surrounding the refugee resettlement deal, which the Obama administration approved. It stipulates that Australia “would transfer up to 1,250 refugees currently held in offshore detention centers on the Pacific Island nation of Nauru and Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island to the United States,” with many of these refugees coming from Iran, according to CNN.
During his conversation with the Australian leader, Trump repeatedly insisted that he heard the number was far higher.
Trump then proceeded to say that he hates “taking these people,” in reference to the refugees.
“I guarantee you they are bad. That is why they are in prison right now,” he said. “They are not going to be wonderful people who go on to work for the local milk people.”
But who are these “local milk people”? Trump was likely referencing the many refugees who take jobs in dairy farms. But a lot of Twitter users had their own ideas about the wording and what it meant.
The Washington Post also published a reproduced transcript of Trump’s call with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto. In it, the president remarks that Nieto speaks “beautifully,” adding that he does not think he “can speak that beautifully.”
We’ll let the local milk people be the judge of that.
This story originally appeared on HuffPost.