If a video released by his campaign over the weekend is an indication of how Donald Trump plans to go about courting the millions of Hispanic voters alienated by his insistence on building a border wall, promises of mass deportations, and insulting comments about Mexican immigrants, the effort seems...unlikely to succeed.
The presumptive Republican presidential nominee recorded a two-and-a-half minute video greeting the attendees at this weekend’s National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, and the overall impression it gives is that Trump put as little effort into it as possible.
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Seated in a large, leather chair, Trump appears to be aboard his private jet as he refers to a list of bullet points on a piece of paper sitting on the table in front of him. The video seems to have been filmed with a cellphone camera, and the sound quality is poor. At one point, Trump has to snatch back his notes before they fall off the table -- something that for any candidate serious about the audience he’s addressing would probably require a second take.
But looking beyond the slapdash production to the actual content of the message doesn’t make things look much better. If the address was supposed to be tailored to Trump’s audience at all, the tailoring was done by someone who thinks Hispanic voters are all poor, live in bad neighborhoods, and are probably unemployed. To be sure, that’s true of many minority voters in the US, but it’s a rather large assumption to make about a group that now counts as nearly 20 percent of the US population.
On his plan to reform the tax code, Trump insists, “People that are poor are going to pay nothing. They’re struggling, it’s tough, and under my plan...you’re going to see it’s nothing. Absolutely nothing. You’re going to get it, you’re going to go out, we’re going to bring back jobs, you’re going to start paying taxes after you’re making a lot of money, and hopefully that’s going to be soon.”
As he reaches the end of the video, having rescued his notes from falling off the table, Trump looks down at them, as though checking to remind himself who it is he’s addressing, and says, “National Hispanic Christian. Three. Great. Words.”
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He continues: “We’re going to take care of you, we’re going to work with you. You’re going to be very happy. You’re going to like President Trump.”
Trump’s unfavorable rating among Hispanic voters is sky-high at 74 percent, so one might expect him to look as though he is actually trying when he reaches out to them. But then again, this is Trump, to whom none of the typical rules has so far applied. Perhaps they won’t apply here, either.
