Trump Hates Latinos; Why Do So Many Latinos Love Him?
Trump’s appeal to Hispanic values, and Democrats’ misunderstanding of them
“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” declared Donald Trump while announcing his presidential candidacy in June of 2015.
“They’re sending people that have lots of problems. And they’re bringing those problems with [them]. They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
Over the next year and a half, Trump’s anti-immigration and anti-Latino rhetoric escalated. The Republican presidential hopeful aggressively conflated immigration with crime. The centerpiece of his campaign was a pledge to build a wall on the southern border and make Mexico pay for it.
Trump secured the Republican nomination a year later. Democrats were positively giddy, dismissing the six-times bankrupt businessman turned game show host as laughably unelectable. Surely his relentless attacks on Latin American migrants would prove the accelerant to turbocharge the emergence of Latino voters as a Democratic constituency as reliable as Black voters, roughly 90% of whom typically support Democratic presidential candidates.
