If there is a more surreal place on the planet to be employed right now than the Republican National Committee, David Lynch ought to make a movie out of it. The organization responsible for getting Republicans elected is now facing the task of drumming up national support for Donald Trump -- the same candidate who called the party’s primary system “rigged” and blasted its chairman, Reince Priebus, as someone who “should be ashamed of himself.”
But for pure, concentrated cognitive dissonance, it’s hard to imagine anything more disorienting than working in the RNC’s Hispanic outreach operation at a time when the party’s presumptive nominee appears to be doing everything he can to alienate Hispanic voters.
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Between suggestions that the Mexican government is sending rapists and murderers across the Southern border and a promise to build a massive wall and then deport more than 11 million people in the country illegally, Trump has driven his negative numbers with Hispanic voters above 80 percent.
It’s got to be incredibly frustrating for the RNC in general. After losing the 2012 election, the party conducted a much-discussed “autopsy” that determined winning over Hispanic voters was key to any hope of putting a Republican in the White House. No doubt that frustration was most acute in the Hispanic outreach area, which is reportedly why Ruth Guerra, hired two years ago to supervise the effort, recently resigned.
As James Hohmann of The Washington Post reported this morning, Guerra is widely believed to have left because she had grown “exhausted with having to defend The Donald on TV and in public appearances.”
Just how tough was her job? Tough enough that the only person the RNC could find to replace Guerra was Helen Aguirre Ferré, a conservative Spanish-language conservative talk-show host who has been a vocal and scathing critic of ... Donald Trump.
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Aguirre Ferré has deleted social media postings critical of Donald Trump, but is on the record in various other media slamming the billionaire former reality television star for his statements about Hispanics and predicting that the GOP would refuse to coalesce around him.
As Hohmann notes, two key staffers involved in outreach to African Americans have already left the GOP since it became clear that Trump was the likely nominee.
The whole point of the post-2012 autopsy was to prevent the GOP from sliding into irrelevance as a refuge for an ever-shrinking base of angry, aging white people. Trump seems intent on going down exactly that path.
