It was billed as a roundtable discussion with Latino leaders, but the reality of Donald Trump’s appearance at his Doral golf club in Miami on Tuesday was a succession of adulatory monologues from his most loyal Latino supporters, interspersed with familiar, lengthy rants from the former president laden with grievances and insults.
Kamala Harris, his Democratic opponent in the 5 November election, also courted Latino voters on Tuesday in an interview with Telemundo, touching on creating economic opportunity for Latino men.
Little of Trump’s conversation, such as it was, related to issues directly affecting Latino voters, with whom Trump falsely claimed he was leading in the polls despite significant evidence to the contrary.
His remarks about immigration, for example, were largely limited to baseless and often-aired claims that foreign countries, especially Venezuela, were opening their prisons to send “violent gang members” and drug dealers into the US with military weapons.
And, his comments addressed to the many business owners and leaders present were distinctly light on policy, apart from a promise to maintain the generous tax cuts from his first term in office.
“We gave you the biggest cut in taxes in the history of the country,” he said. “We have a great foundation to build on so we have a lot of companies coming in very fast.”
Trump trails Harris in all battleground states among Latinos, a poll for Voto Latino published on Monday and cited by the Hill, found, while the most recent AS/COA poll tracker shows a 56-31 preference for Harris nationally among the 36 million eligible Latino voters.
Harris, in Tuesday’s Telemundo interview, emphasized the economy, saying she would work to bring more funds to community banks to help Latino men secure small business loans. “We need to construct a strong economy that supports the working class,” she said.
“I know that Hispanic men often have more difficulty securing loans from banks because of their connections and the fact that things aren’t necessarily set up so that they will qualify,” she said in an interview in English that was translated into Spanish. “For that reason, I’m focused on seeing what we can do to bring more capital to community banks that better understand the community so we can give them that kind of loans.”
Harris said she would work to double the number of registered apprenticeships. She is stressing how she would remove college degree requirements for certain federal government jobs and encourage private employers to do likewise. Harris also said she wants to provide forgivable loans worth up to $20,000 each to 1m small businesses.
The efforts from both camps to connect with their respective Latino bases sets up a question of whether the promise of new policies under Harris or memories of a Trump presidency will do more to energize Latino voters.
Still, there is evidence Trump has been gaining ground, with the Democratic edge among Latino voters at its lowest level in four presidential election cycles, according to NBC News polling.
Perhaps with this in mind, Trump was directly appealing to the Latino bloc for the second time in less than a week at Tuesday’s roundtable.
“We’re going to talk about what’s happening with the election. We’ll take some questions from the fake news,” he said after a raucous welcome to the stage.
Ultimately, he took none, ensuring he would avoid a repeat of his misfire at a town hall hosted by Univision, the largest US Spanish-language network, in Miami last Thursday when he mostly dodged awkward questions about immigration from undecided voters. At that event, he repeated debunked claims that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were eating pets and “other things too that they’re not supposed to”.
Tuesday’s audience, a gallery of pre-screened ultra-loyalists at Trump National Doral, appeared unconcerned by the lack of a dialogue, cheering loudly at every insult. Trump called Harris “a stupid person” as he falsely labeled her Joe Biden’s “border tsar” during a brief section on immigration.
His remarks segued quickly into an attack on Democrats for allegedly allowing transgender athletes to play women’s sports, and he told a somewhat fanciful tale of “a man who transitioned into, congratulations, a woman” smashing a baseball so hard it hit a female player on the head and “these young ladies said they’d never seen anything like it”.
Calling Harris a “radical-left lunatic”, he added: “There’s a sickness going on in our country. We have to end the sickness.”
Robert Unanue, the president of Goya Foods, the largest Latino-owned food company in the US, and a longtime vocal cheerleader of the former president and his lies that the 2020 election was stolen, stepped up to take the microphone and deliver a lengthy speech praising Trump.
“I can’t believe your courage, your fight, and I know why you’re doing this. You’re not doing it for anything, but because you love this country. You love us, and we love you,” he said.
Unanue was not the only Latino business figure heaping praise. Joel Garza, owner of multiple Sonic fast-food franchises and another veteran of the Trump podium, said the former president needed to be re-elected to “help us with banks [and] stop regulations”.
The ultimate adulation, however, came at the conclusion of the roundtable when a group of religious leaders stood around Trump, who was seated at the table, eyes closed, with their hands on his shoulders.
“We lift up the man that we believe you’ve put your hand upon to help restore America and bring America back to the place that honors you,” Ramiro Peña, one of Trump’s most influential Latino evangelists, said in a direct appeal to the heavens.
The Honduran televangelist Guillermo Maldonado, founder of the Miami megachurch the King Jesus International Ministry, closed out the event with a prediction Trump would defeat Harris because “there’s a higher assignment for him to finish with this nation”.
“This is a war between good and evil,” he insisted. “God sets up kings. He removes kings. We’re going to pray for the will of God to make [Trump] the 47th president.”
Associated Press contributed to this report
