Undecided Latino voters who participated in Donald Trump’s Univision town hall on Wednesday were left deeply unimpressed by the former president.
Three participants in the event expressed their frustration over Trump’s failure to answer them directly or explain his policy proposals in interviews with Rolling Stone. Two of them indicated that their experience with the former president has solidified their decision to vote for his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, while the other says he is still undecided.
José Saralegui, a registered Republican, said he was “very disappointed” in Trump’s performance. During the town hall, Saralegui asked the former president about his frequent invocation of conspiracy theories — and if he truly believed the false claims he’s been spreading about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio. Trump responded by doubling down on his unfounded accusations that migrants in the town are eating local pets. “I wasn’t amazed by any of his answers,” he said.
“His rhetoric hasn’t changed,” he said, adding that he didn’t vote for Trump in 2016 or 2020. “I heard the things he was saying about us Mexicans. He’s let it go now — because now he’s going after the poor Haitians — but during the fist campaign he painted us as rapists, diseased people, anything you can think of.”
Saralegui added that you could see “how the audience was surprised by Trump’s attitude, his answers,” describing the former president as “totally disingenuous” and “arrogant.”
“I’m a Republican but I’m going to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris,” Saralegui told Rolling Stone, adding that he had been present at Harris’ own Univision town hall earlier this month, and had found her more coherent, more presidential, and more grounded than the former president. “Tiene muchos pantalones” — she has a lot of guts — he said.
Guadalupe Ramírez, an Illinois voter whose parents participated in the Bracero Program, told Rolling Stone she came to the town hall with an “open mind,” and a desire to hear “directly from the horse’s mouth,” says she’s now 99 percent sure she’s voting for Harris.
Ramírez asked Trump about his plans to reform the American immigration system, and why he used his influence to tank a bipartisan border bill earlier this year. Having worked with migrants, both documented and undocumented, Ramírez feels that the former president often mischaracterizes and wrongly maligns refugees and asylum seekers as “illegals,” when they in fact have legal status and are “active participants in society” with jobs and families. She would like to see a path to citizenship for DACA recipients and other migrants.
Trump responded to her question by blaming migrants for the crime rate in Chicago, and claiming that “everything the Democrats run is bad.” His rambling response, which failed to address her question, as well as his claims that Americans broadly supported the overturning of Roe v. Wade in response to a separate question, were off putting to Ramírez.
His answer on abortion wasn’t “truthful,” she told Rolling Stone, citing research showing broad public support for protections on reproductive rights and the preservation of Roe. When asked how participants she spoke to felt after the event, Ramírez said the general impression she got was that the former president had done little to sway undecided voters his way the “opposite,” in fact, she said.
Trump “didn’t give us concrete answers,” Jorge Velázquez, a self-described Republican who also participated in the town hall told Rolling Stone. “He didn’t give anyone convincing answers.” Velázquez, an agricultural worker who questioned Trump about the possibility that his plans for mass deportations would raise the prices of produce, says that the former president’s rhetoric about immigrants feels like “he’s humiliating us every time.”
Velázquez, who remains undecided and feels he needs to do a little more digging into each candidate’s platform, added that on immigration the two parties “usually do the same thing, the only difference is that [Harris] doesn’t insult us.”
In his conversations with other attendees, Velázquez says the group of voters felt dissatisfied with the answers they got from the former president, and that he’d simply “given the spin” to their questions.
Both Velázquez and Saralegui referenced a viral interaction between Trump and another attendee, Ramiro González, as a benchmark for how town hall attendees felt about the former president. González, who did not respond to an interview request from Rolling Stone, questioned Trump directly about Jan. 6, and asked him point blank why he should vote for him when former members of his own administration — including former Vice President Mike Pence — have publicly disavowed him.
Trump responded by quickly dismissing the criticism from his ex-officials and advisers, and described the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol as a “day of love.” González — a former registered Republican — didn’t bother to hide his skepticism, throwing the former president a pointed look of incredulity.
In an interview after the town hall, González stated that he didn’t get the answer he was looking for. “I saw what happened, I watched the television, and I’ve seen many news clips about what happened that day,” he added, “I’m not voting for him.”
Saralegui, who described himself as a lifelong Republican and spoke to González, says that “once the MAGA movement leaves the Republican Party I might once again become a Republican.”
“Primero la patria que el partido,” he adds — first patriotism, then the party.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
