Trump hurts GOP with Latinos
“I have a great relationship with the Mexican people. They love me, I love them. And I’ll tell you something, if I get the nomination, I’ll win the Latino vote.”
Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump to NBC News on July 8.
Muchas gracias se帽or Trump!
Donald Trump keeps telling anybody who’ll listen that he’s going to get the Latino vote.
Fat chance.
Latinos don’t seem to like the guy – and for good reason.
He doesn’t seem to like them either.
That’s why, while his poll numbers among many Republicans have skyrocketed, his favorability among Latinos is in a tailspin.
A recent poll indicates that 81 percent of Latino voters view Trump unfavorably.
“I will get more Latinos than anybody else,” Trump recently told CNN’s Anderson Cooper, with his signature bluster.
And with each new call to stop those “rapists” (his words) from coming north from Mexico, serious-minded Republicans are having to tap-dance around Se帽or Trump and his penchant for hogging the spotlight.
Trump’s fellow Republican presidential candidate, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, has had enough of the Donald Trump sideshow.
“His comments were inappropriate. That’s now the 50th time I’ve said it; it will be the last time,” Christie told Fox News.
Presidential candidate Lindsey Graham, who’s the most outspoken about Trump’s shenanigans has said, “The way he’s engaged the public is hurting the Republican Party at a time when we have a chance to do better.”
As I write this sentence, there are 16 declared Republican presidential candidates. By the end of this paragraph there could be two or three more.
They all have one thing in common. They have Donald Trump on their minds.
He’s slowly becoming the front-running candidate, who virtually no serious-minded Republican thinks can win the nomination.
“We should have invaded Mexico,” he reportedly told a group of Hollywood conservatives a couple of weeks ago.
To him, Iraq was the wrong country to invade. Mexico, for some reason, should have been in the U.S. crosshairs.
For a guy who likes to tell people how smart he is (“My I.Q. is one of the highest – and you all know it.” – May of 2013 on Twitter), he sure says a lot of dumb things.
And in light of the Republican Party’s stated goal of fetching Latino votes through it’s ham-handed “minority outreach,” he’s bound to make some Republicans wish he’d go away; or at least shut-up.
His supporters, and even non-supporters, though, claim that his careless statements have opened up a nationwide discussion about immigration reform.
Claiming “we’ve got to secure the border,” or “we need to build a wall,” has been part of the “discussion” for years, with no apparently political solutions on the horizon.
What people are really talking about is Donald Trump.
And nobody could be happier about that than Donald Trump.
Trump’s foul rhetoric extended to the brutal murder of Kate Steinle on a San Francisco pier earlier this month.
True, an illegal immigrant with multiple felony convictions has been charged with the crime. But there’s simply no evidence, as Trump would like us to believe, that it was because “the worst elements in Mexico are being pushed into the United States by the Mexican government.”
If Trump gets his way, he could mount a nationwide boycott of Taco Bell, even though it’s headquartered in Irvine, California; it’s owned by Americans, and is no more Mexican than Kentucky Fried Chicken.
None of this will help Republicans build a voting coalition that includes Latino voters.
Mitt Romney only got 27 percent of the Hispanic voter in 2012.
In fact, shortly after the election, Trump weighed in on Romney’s failure to attract more Latino votes.
“Republicans didn’t have anything going for them with respect to Latinos and with respect to Asians,” he said in late November of 2012.
But to show the fanciful world in which Se帽or Trump now operates, he said back then that, “The Democrats didn’t have a policy for dealing with illegal immigrants, but what they did have going for them is they weren’t mean-spirited about it.”
Well, who’s mean-spirited now?
Edward A. Owens is a three-time Emmy Award winner and 20-year veteran of television news. E-mail him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net