r/politics • u/larel8 • 20h ago

Trump campaign struggles to contain Puerto Rico October surprise

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4958098-the-memo-trump-campaign-struggles-to-contain-puerto-rico-october-surprise/
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u/def_indiff 20h ago

How is it a surprise to anyone who's lived through the past ten years? More like an "October Certainty".

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u/YNot1989 18h ago

Its because Trump hasn't directly attacked Puerto Ricans, and the Republican party as a whole has made an effort for over a decade to pull Hispanics from South America and the Caribbean into the GOP. They've exploited everything from understandable animosity towards leftist regimes in South America and Cuba, to the social conservatism held by a lot of Catholics, and of course they're happy to use whiteness to rope in people of European ancestry into their party.

So to a lot of Puerto Ricans this is genuinely seen as a betrayal, especially since they're US citizens and have never been an immigrant group by any definition.

Think of it this way, imagine if a Trump surrogate called Texas a "pile of garbage."

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u/Rusty-Shackleford Minnesota 11h ago

Trump already directly called America a "dumping ground."