As shocking as this may sound, Donald Trump has a team of 30 Hispanic advisors. Thirty of them! Thirty whole entire Hispanic people who support Donald Trump and wish to advise him on matters relevant to their interests. Thirty Hispanic people who thought to themselves "Yes, Donald Trump is surely the man for us."
And you may ask yourselves, how did they get there?
Or, rather, whether or not they were listening to a single thing Donald Trump had actually said in the entire time he'd been running for President and how on earth they would not find any of that a little bit insulting. And it turns out that they were, kinda, but that they didn't think he was serious. They did not obey the cardinal Maya Angelou rule of "When someone shows you who they are, believe them." Or even the Robyn Pennacchia rule of "Fucking know when you have been insulted." They thought, like so many girlfriends of irredeemable assholes: I can change him.
Upon hearing his speech on immigration yesterday, it seems that at least 15 of those advisors finally got the point. According to conservative pundit Leslie Sanchez, that's how many are geared up to resign.
The first to officially quit Trump's National Hispanic Advisory Council was Houston Attorney Jacob Monty, who said “I was a strong supporter of Donald Trump when I believed he was going to address the immigration problem realistically and compassionately. What I heard today was not realistic and not compassionate.”
The key word here is "believed." Donald Trump is actually not at fault here. He gave no one, including Jacob Monty, any reason to believe that anything he would do as president could be described as either realistic or compassionate. Least of all his plan to deport 11 million people from the country.
Texas pastor Ramiro Peña is also considering retracting his support, and told Jennifer Korn, the RNC's national director of Hispanic Initiatives, that he felt scammed.
"I am so sorry but I believe Mr. Trump lost the election tonight. The 'National Hispanic Advisory Council' seems to be simply for optics and I do not have the time or energy for a scam."
Again, not really a scam! A scam is when you promise one thing and then deliver another. Like Trump University students -- they were scammed. Peña was not scammed. He bought land in Florida from someone literally telling him that it was in the middle of a swamp, and assumed that the person was secretly super nice and would give him a beautiful condo in Miami instead of the swampland he bought.
Alfonso Aguilar, the president of the Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles and prominent Trump critic-turned-defender, said he was considering pulling his support as well.
“It’s so disappointing because we feel we took a chance, a very risky chance. We decided to make a big U-turn to see if we could make him change. We thought we were moving in the right direction … we’re disappointed. We feel misled.”
No, Alfonso, you were not misled. You chose to believe something that wasn't true, because it felt good to you to believe it, and that is very different from being misled.
Now, Donald Trump misleads people in a lot of ways! He does. He's got a lot of people convinced that he can bring manufacturing back to America, and that those jobs will pay like they used to even though they most likely won't be unionized. That is very misleading, and in fact cruel. He's promised them that he's going to be able to deport millions of immigrants in a day and that Mexico is gonna pay for a wall! And that this is going to mean more jobs for them that they can earn a living off of! That's misleading! He's also telling them that he's going to be a good president, which is perhaps the most misleading thing of all.
In fact, these people may just be one of the only groups in all of Trumpdom that have not been misled. It's nice that they're discovering all of this now, but I think it's quite clear that Trump never promised them a rose garden to begin with.
[Politico]
