What did Donald Trump do today?

He complimented a lifelong native speaker of English, from an English-speaking country in Africa, for speaking good English.

Liberian President Joseph Boakai visited the White House today along with four other African leaders. At one point, with cameras rolling, Trump singled out Boakai for a cringeworthy compliment: "Such good English, it’s beautiful. Where did you learn to speak so beautifully?"

Boakai should be fluent in English: he's been speaking it his whole life, like most Liberians. In fact, at 81 years old, he's been speaking it longer than Trump. The west African nation was organized by formerly enslaved Black Americans, and American influence can be seen in everything from its star-and-stripes flag to the name of its capital (Monrovia, after U.S. President James Monroe) to its official language—English.

Boakai responded diplomatically, saying only that he'd learned it in Liberia, without elaborating. Trump, perhaps sensing that he had put his foot in it, tried to turn the compliment into a joke about the language skills of his own cabinet. (For the record, they are all fluent speakers of English too.)

Trump's disdain for Africa and Africans is well known. He famously called them "shithole countries." He's singled them out disproportionately for travel bans. He assumes nobody else has heard of the ones he hasn't heard of, and says so in the State of the Union Address. He attacks political rivals with African roots as though it were something to be ashamed of. His idea of an olive branch is to offer Africa's militantly post-colonial governments a second chance at being economically colonized by the United States. He closed the borders to legal refugee and asylum claims from Africa, only to pointedly offer a kind of luxury version of it to "refugees" from South Africa who promote a white supremacist hoax of persecution by that country's post-Apartheid government.  

Praising Black people's ability to "speak well," as though it were a surprise, is an old racist trope. (Chris Rock did a bit on it in a 1996 comedy show, and it was old then.)

Trump's staff did damage control by bringing out the closest thing his White House has to an African envoy: Massad Boulos, his daughter Tiffany's father-in-law. Boulos is Lebanese but lived for a time in Nigeria, where he essentially built a business reputation by posing as a member of a different Boulos family that ran successful businesses there.

Why does this matter? 

• To put it in terms Trump would understand, this is the diplomatic equivalent of missing a one-inch putt.  

• The problem with well-intentioned racism is that it's racism.