Hispanic leaders: GOP must condemn Trump

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

Hispanic leaders are warning of harm to Republican White House hopes unless the party’s presidential contenders do more to condemn Donald Trump, a businessman turned presidential candidate who’s refusing to apologize for calling Mexican immigrants rapists and drug dealers.

Trump’s comments, delivered in his announcement speech last month, have haunted the GOP for much of the past two weeks and dominated Spanish-language media. It’s bad timing for a Republican Party that has invested significantly in Hispanic outreach in recent years, given the surging influence of the minority vote.

Yet several Republican candidates have avoided the issue altogether, while those who have weighed in have declined to criticize Trump as strongly as many Hispanic leaders would like.

“The time has come for the candidates to distance themselves from Trump and call his comments what they are: ludicrous, baseless and insulting,” said Alfonso Aguilar, a Republican who leads the American Principles Project’s Latino Partnership. “Sadly, it hurts the party with Hispanic voters. It’s a level of idiocy I haven’t seen in a long time.”

The political and practical Trump-related fallout has intensified in recent days.

The leading Hispanic television network, Univision, has backed out of televising the Miss USA pageant, a joint venture between Trump and NBC, which also cut ties with Trump. On Wednesday, the Macy’s department store chain, which carried a Donald Trump menswear line, said it was ending its relationship with him. Other retailers are facing pressure to follow suit.

Trump is showing no sign of backing down.

“My statements have been contorted to seem racist and discriminatory,” he wrote in a message to supporters Thursday. “What I want is for legal immigrants to not be unfairly punished because others are coming into America illegally, flooding the labor market and not paying taxes.”

“You can count on me to keep fighting,” he continued.

In his announcement speech, Trump said Mexican immigrants are “bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

Such rhetoric resonates with some of the Republican Party’s most passionate voters, who have long viewed illegal immigration as one of the nation’s most pressing problems.