The Party of Trump:

Preamble  

America’s strength is its people. Our country’s diversity has helped us innovate to solve problems, avoid cultural stagnation, become the most prosperous nation in history, and better navigate a complex world. However, the politics of division have grown more vicious in recent years, with extreme voices inciting Americans to mistrust and even hate people because of their race, religion, origin, or sexual orientation. These voices push policies to codify that mistrust into law, threatening our values, rights, economic and social well-being, and even our lives. America’s Hispanic community, which represents nearly one in every five people in our country, has been made a major target of that hate, already with tragic and long-term consequences. 

Whether we call ourselves Hispanic, Latino, or Latinx, we are a community defined by family, hard work, patriotism, and service to our communities. We are White, Black, Asian, and Native American. We are Americans with roots as old as the country itself, as well as first-generation aspiring patriots. We span the political, religious, and gender identity spectrum. We are rural, urban, and suburban. In many ways, Latinos embody America’s diversity. Perhaps it is not surprising that a target has been put on our backs at a time that our country’s diversity, and the ideal of “out of many, one,” is under attack. 

Latinos have long had to endure challenges to our rightful place in the American family. We were locked in segregated neighborhoods, isolated in poor schools, and routinely discriminated against in the housing and labor markets. Toxic immigration rhetoric is used as a thinly veiled proxy to stir up antagonism against Latinos, eight out of 10 of whom are United States citizens. The same brush is used to paint our fellow Americans in Puerto Rico as permanent outsiders, subject to American laws but never full members of the body politic. And that is why, while Hispanics share many of the same concerns as other Americans, their history and lived experiences make the treatment of Puerto Ricans—and of recent immigrants—deeply personal. Such treatment has become a prism through which Latinos gauge political leaders’ sentiment toward our community.  

In the past, Latinos have demonstrated willingness to look at candidates based on their policies and position, not just their party affiliation. To this day, the Latino electorate wants to see candidates that value diversity and bring people together, who are willing to work with both sides of the aisle to govern. Diminishing Hispanic support for Republican candidates in recent years does not reflect a change in the Latino electorate. Rather, it reflects an indictment of a change in the Republican party. While heated debate over policy differences has always been part of the process, in today’s GOP, resolving those differences to advance the business of the people and to govern effectively have too often taken a backseat. Instead, the party has embraced the politics of division, exclusion, and hate, tearing down the Republican tent once meant to more accurately reflect the American people. 

That was not always the case, and certainly the hope is that it does not remain so. Republican presidential candidates and governors who sought to make inroads with Latino voters have done so by presenting the image of a welcoming party, inclusive, focused on opportunity, and in rewarding hard work. Take, for example, the words and actions of Presidents Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush: 

“I received a letter just before I left office from a man. I don’t know why he chose to write it, but I’m glad he did. He wrote that you can go to live in France, but you can’t become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Italy, but you can’t become a German, an Italian. He went through Turkey, Greece, Japan, and other countries. But he said anyone, from any corner of the world, can come to live in the United States and become an American.” —Ronald Reagan 

“If we ever closed the door to new Americans our leadership would be lost.” —Ronald Reagan 

“Nearly all Americans have ancestors who braved the oceans—liberty-loving risk takers in search of an ideal—the largest voluntary migrations in recorded history.… Immigration is not just a link to America’s past; it’s also a bridge to America’s future.” —George H.W. Bush 

“Latinos come to the U.S. to seek the same dreams that have inspired millions of others: they want a better life for their children. Family values do not stop at the Rio Grande. Latinos enrich our country with faith in God, a strong ethic of work, community, and responsibility. We can all learn from the strength, solidarity, and values of Latinos. Immigration is not a problem to be solved; it is the sign of a successful nation. New Americans are to be welcomed as neighbors, and not to be feared as strangers.” —George W. Bush 

Intense differences and debates abounded, but under these administrations, there were at least some efforts, through outreach and policies, to find some common ground with Latinos. President Reagan’s 1986 tax bill had the first refundable earned income credit that today lifts more than 2.3 million Latinos out of poverty each year. Immigration reforms he signed into law that same year provided a pathway to citizenship for three million previously undocumented immigrants. George H.W. Bush signed the Civil Rights Act of 1991, an extension of the Voting Rights Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and included two Latinos in his cabinet. George W. Bush signed into law the No Child Left Behind Act, with federal education law reforms that aimed to lift academic standards and hold schools accountable for educating minority students. He supported creation of a Child Tax Credit that today benefits many Latino families, worked hard on comprehensive immigration reform, and appointed three Latinos to his cabinet, including the first—and so far only—Hispanic attorney general in the nation’s history.      

These Republican Party leaders made it possible for other Republican lawmakers to champion issues that address the concerns of Latinos: Senator Orrin Hatch was an original cosponsor of the Children’s Health Insurance Program, the DREAM Act, and later of the Immigrant Children’s Health Inclusion Act. Former Republican Representative Jim Walsh was a champion of restoring Food Stamps/SNAP access to legal immigrants. Senator and HUD Secretary Mel Martinez promoted homeownership and inclusive housing policies, building off of the legacy of GOP congressman and former Republican vice presidential nominee Jack Kemp. 

In 2012, after suffering a significant loss, fueled by increasingly anti-Latino and anti-immigrant Republican positions, the national Republican Party appeared to reach a turning point. The Republican National Committee’s autopsy2 spelled out a fundamental truth: that the party’s base of largely White voters was shrinking, while Latinos and other groups were growing and a new approach was needed to stay competitive. The authors found that Latinos viewed the party as unwelcoming and proposed 15 steps to embrace, engage, empower, and support Hispanics. That lucid moment is now long past; the distance between the National Republican Party and the nation’s Latinos couldn’t be wider. Those making a case for the expansion of the party’s base have been largely ostracized or benched, and rather than a larger tent, the door to the National Republican Party is now walled off and above it hangs a sign that says “Whites Only.”  

As a result, never has concern about anti-Latino racism registered this high among Hispanic voters; in a 2019 poll3, 86 percent of Latino voters identified it as a problem. And more than half of Hispanics, regardless of their political or ideological views, see the Republican party as hostile toward Latinos. With Donald Trump’s election in 2016 and the near total capitulation of Congressional Republicans to his party takeover, today’s Republican Party is the party of White nationalists.   

Since 2016 the Republican Party has:

• Turned American exceptionalism upside down; we now resemble the most undemocratic and authoritarian regimes in the world and rank last among nations confronting the spread of a worldwide pandemic. 

• Affirmed that taking away health care from Americans is okay, and the answer is to replace the Affordable Care Act with nothing. 

• Enabled actions by the president to unconstitutionally subvert the Census, breaking a previously nonpartisan covenant that holds our country together. 

• Allowed the president to reward people who have blatantly violated our community’s civil rights by pardoning Sheriff Joe Arpaio.   

• Collaborated in putting Latino children in cages and separating families.   

• Appeased the president’s efforts to terminate DACA and TPS protections.  

• Enabled the president to intimidate and threaten American families with immigrant parents who are food-insecure through the infamous “public charge” rule and other regulations that deter people from accessing critical safety-net services during a global pandemic. 

• Made it possible for this administration to repeatedly and aggressively undermine the sanctity of the right to vote. 

• Ensured the mistreatment of U.S. citizens on the island of Puerto Rico by withholding badly needed disaster relief in the wake of a hurricane and earthquakes.   

• Stayed silent when the president equated racial justice protestors with those who view Latinos as an inferior race. 

We know there are Republican leaders who still believe in a bigger tent, an inclusive and unified society, and a better and more diverse future for the country. We ask them, and all Americans uwho want a better and stronger country, to join us in committing to:  

• Reject blind obedience, when that obedience costs lives in all American communities.  

• Protect our democratic institutions and norms, especially the right to vote and to have those votes counted. 

• Be courageous and reward courage, especially for those who speak truth, like the scientists and health professionals working to protect us from a deadly pandemic. 

• Speak out against appeals to racial animus, including coded “dog whistles” that promote racial division that some in the GOP have tolerated for decades. 

• Return to traditional American ideals: pluralism, freedom, and a shared American “can-do” spirit that has enabled the most diverse nation in the world to also become—prior to the last four years—the most prosperous society in history.  

About the UnidosUS Action Fund  

is a Latino advocacy organization that works to expand the influence and political power of the Latino community through civic engagement and issue-based campaigns. UnidosUS Action Fund takes the courageous policy visions outlined by our sister organization, UnidosUS, and works to make them a reality. Follow UnidosUS Action Fund on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.