President Donald Trump received international opprobrium when, in 2018, he referred to sub-Saharan Africa as being full of “s***hole countries.”

Trump’s team could do little to put lipstick on the pig — there was no way to interpret what the president said as anything other than unvarnished racism. The State Department’s Africa Bureau and U.S. Africa Command advancing regional partnerships with African counterparts did little to mitigate the damage Trump had wrought.