The New York Times editorial board excoriated the Trump campaign’s planned “Hispanic engagement tour” as a “farcical gesture” given Trump’s dehumanization of the Latino electorate and resultant widespread belief among Latinos that Trump is “racist.”
The Trump campaign’s announcement that it plans to reach out to Hispanic voters comes amid the whitest Republican National Convention in a century -- an event celebrated by white nationalists and criticized by the media for its hostility toward Latinos. The sudden interest in engagement is also surprising given Trump’s tendency to reject requests for interviews with Hispanic media.
The Times editorial explained that, despite Trump’s sudden realization “of the limits of a presidential campaign based on chauvinism and fear,” it’s too late for him to repair the damage he’s done with the Latino community. The editorial noted that “a new Latino Decisions survey has 83 percent of Latino voters saying Mr. Trump is a racist.” From the July 21 editorial:
But after the lights go down in Cleveland, when the yelling subsides, the balloons go limp and the delegates go home, the party will be alone with its message and its nominee.
What next? Why, minority outreach, of course. “Donald Trump’s going to be doing a Hispanic engagement tour coming up soon,” said the party chairman, Reince Priebus.
“Engagement” doesn’t seem likely, given public reactions to the Trump campaign’s message of suspicion and disgust. In some states, Mr. Trump is polling at zero among black voters. A new Latino Decisions survey has 83 percent of Latino voters saying Mr. Trump is a racist, and 71 percent saying he has made the Republican Party more hostile to Latinos. Those results track closely with other polls this month, one conducted by The Wall Street Journal and NBC News and one by Univision.[...]
The Latino electorate, meanwhile, isn’t going away or shrinking. Neither is the challenge of confronting immigration. Instead of a “Hispanic engagement tour,” which is almost sure to be a farcical gesture, Republicans could stop demonizing immigrants and start thinking about actually fixing the immigration system.
This means getting back to where they were only three years ago, when an ambitious bipartisan plan handily passed the Senate. That bill was blocked by hard-core House Republicans fanning the same border hysteria and cultural anxieties that Mr. Trump exploits today. Republicans will eventually understand — even if their nominee does not — that there is no future in being the party of white grievance and racial exclusion. Not in these diverse United States. Whether that insight is reached through reflection and self-correction, or an autopsy of yet another failed presidential campaign, remains to be seen.