At a town hall with undecided Latino voters hosted by Univision on Wednesday, former President Donald Trump, facing tough questions over his words and deeds, continued to maintain that he had never uttered a falsehood or done anything wrong. For most of the event, Trump spoke to a stone-faced audience who did not appear enthusiastic over his defiance.
Ramiro Gonzalez, a construction worker and Florida Republican who is no longer registered to vote, gave Trump a chance to "win back" his support if he could explain his behavior during the Jan. 6 insurrection and COVID-19 pandemic.
"Your action, and maybe inaction, during your presidency and the last few years sort of … was a little disturbing to me. What happened during Jan. 6 and the fact that you waited so long to take action while your supporters were attacking the Capitol," he said. He added that he was concerned over how the public was "misled," that "many more lives could have been saved" during COVID-19, noting that many of Trump's former administration officials don't support him anymore, including former Vice President Mike Pence.
Trump, declaring that he "totally disagreed with what [Pence] did," said there was "nothing done wrong at all" by his supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, a "day of love," he said, where "nobody was killed." Gonzalez, tilting his head, appeared skeptical.
“You had hundreds of thousands of people come to Washington. They didn’t come because of me, they came because of the election,” Trump continued, ignoring his role in inciting them with false claims about the 2020 election being stolen and earlier promotion of the Jan. 6 date. “Some of those people went down to the Capitol — I said, ‘peacefully and patriotically.’ Nothing done wrong. At all. Nothing done wrong.”
The former president acknowledged that he "maybe won't" get Gonzalez's vote, "but that's OK too."
For other questions, Trump pivoted to blasting Democrats rather than address what had been asked. When quizzed about his role in persuading Republicans to kill bipartisan legislation this year that would have boosted border security, the former president simply said that "we like strong borders" before criticizing Democratic mayors and governors and then switching to foreign policy. He also declined to clarify whether he believed climate change as a hoax or stake out a position on abortion, though he bragged about his role in overturning Roe v. Wade.
When the topic turned to false claims that Haitian immigrants were eating pets, Trump, rather than backing down, hinted that there's even more to the story. “This was just reported. I was just saying what was reported,” Trump claimed, falsely. “And [they are] eating other things, too, that they’re not supposed to be.”
