Donald Trump’s interview with Noticias Univision on Thursday clearly revealed the 2024 Republican front-runner’s pitch to Latino voters. The former president will placate them and exploit the community’s political divisions to no end, all with the hope that if Trump becomes his party’s nominee, he can sway more Latino support for a return to the White House.
At the start of the interview, journalist and Televisa anchor Enrique Acevedo cited how a New York Times/Siena poll showed Trump with 42% of Latino support across six battleground states.
Such remarks will elicit only a fraction of the outrage or pushback Trump received when he first ran for president.
Trump’s initial reaction was filled with praise and compliments. It was a far cry from his now infamous anti-Mexican, anti-Latino claims during the 2016 campaign that Mexico was sending drug dealers and rapists to take over the U.S., or the time he told anchor Jorge Ramos to “go back to Univision” when Trump felt Ramos had spoken out of turn at a press conference.
“The Latino vote is so incredible because they’re unbelievable people. They have incredible skills, incredible energy, and they’re very entrepreneurial. All you have to do is look at the owners of Univision,” Trump told Acevedo in English on Thursday night. “They’re unbelievable entrepreneurial people. And they like me. You know, there’s never been anything like it in the Republican Party. I’ve been a Republican and am a Republican, and we have tremendous support from the, I call Hispanic, Latino, you have lots of different terms. But it all means the same thing as far as I’m concerned. It’s, they’re just great people, incredible people. And they also want security if they’re in the United States or if they’re in Mexico or anywhere else. They feel strong about security, and we provide that.”
Those compliments soon veered into other realities that Latinos in the U.S. has grappled with for years. Those “coming in legally” like Cubans, Venezuelans and Nicaraguans should be lauded, Trump told Acevedo. But countries like El Salvador and Honduras “are not sending their best.”
“They’re sending us MS13. They’re sending us gang members from all over the place. They’re sending us people that have mental problems from mental institutions” he said. Later in the interview, he even compared those immigrants to a fictional character. “That’s ‘Silence of the Lambs.’ That’s Hannibal Lecter. You ever hear of Hannibal Lecter? Not a nice person. But these are people that are very, very disturbed, very, very mentally ill. They’re being dropped into the United States.” (Trump did allow that “good people are coming in, too.”)
Such remarks will elicit only a fraction of the outrage or pushback Trump received when he first ran for president, and not just because his xenophobia is so well documented. Noticias Univision’s decision to broadcast the interview on the main Univision network with Spanish dubbing meant that not only was Trump’s message shared in both languages, but that the Spanish interpreter made the words sound more muted, palatable and measured. Watching the Spanish-language version was like a dubbed movie, with Trump as a native Spanish speaker running for president.
There are plenty of Latinos who see privilege in their American citizenship, enough to the point that it creates real division.
In one sense, sitting down with Univision simply reflects demographic reality: New Census data released this week projected that Latinos will account for 25% of the entire U.S. population by 2060. Trump and his campaign know that the Latino vote will continue to grow out there in 2024, and going “back to Univision” is politically expedient.








