President Trump’s Most Loyal Supporters: The Hispanic Community

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. At the end of President Donald Trump’s first 100 days, there were a number of polls that came out. Most of them were liberal and most of them were negative.

And as we mentioned and have mentioned in the past, some of them who have a much more reliable history—such as the Rasmussen poll, the Insider Advantage poll, the Trafalgar poll—they all had Donald Trump, at the end of 100 days, with either roughly 50-50 approval ratings or even slightly above that, 48-46, 50-49.

But my point is, in one of the daily Rasmussen polls, they had an astonishing figure, that they broke down Donald Trump’s support by ethnic category.

And there were 39% of black Americans that expressed support for Donald Trump. That’s an astonishing number. Given that 95% of the news coverage, according to the Media Research Center, has been negative. And yet here is a traditional Democratic constituency where 4 out of 10 people like what’s been going on.

But even more astonishing is the ethnic constituency that expressed the highest approval of Donald Trump’s first 100 days was the Hispanic community. In fact, far above the so-called white community.

How can that be possible? The Democratic Party had told us that closing the border and stopping the illegal entry of 10 to 12 million illegal aliens during the Biden administration—that was deeply unpopular to the Hispanic community.

And then, the deportations of illegal aliens like Kilmar Abrego Garcia, for example, or Eduardo Flores-Ruiz that was in Judge Hannah Dugan’s courtroom, whom she tried to hide. He was the assaulter of three people, including women. This was supposed to be deeply unpopular. But it actually has the opposite effect.

And why would that be? The reason is that when 12 million people come in illegally and they gravitate to certain constituencies or enclaves, they usually feel more at home with fellow Spanish-speaking Americans. And where is that? That is along the Rio Grande Valley. That is in Texas. That is in parts of New Mexico. That is in the San Joaquin Valley.

What am I getting at? What I’m getting at is that a group of elites in the Biden administration, for particular political purposes—and I’ll be frank here—I think they did want people to come in, both to serve as future constituents under the lax rules and protocols of early and mail-in voting, and also to grow the government and have more constituencies on welfare.

But in any case, the price, the cost, the toll fell most heavily on Hispanic communities. These were the ones that were trying to get competitive Advanced Placement programs in their schools. And suddenly they have English as a Second Language programs again. They were the ones at dialysis clinics, at emergency rooms that were swarmed with people who in some cases had never been to a doctor. And so, they bore the greatest brunt of it.

They were in cities where the Biden administration flew people in at night from Mexico and then dispersed them in Hispanic communities. And so they were very angry.

And why would so-called white people poll much more negatively against Trump’s first 100 days than Hispanics? It’s because the white elite had created an agenda under the Biden and Obama administration that was elitist.

By that I mean—let’s face it—Sen. Bernie Sanders had to take out the word “millionaires” from his usual castigation of millionaires and billionaires. And it wasn’t just because he’s a millionaire now. That is the trademark of the professional bicoastal classes. And they’re interested in issues that are not existential—at least not everyday existential. By that I mean global warming, the Green New Deal, transgendered men in women’s sports, international organizations—the U.N.

But they’re not interested in what the Hispanic working classes are interested in. And that’s affordable gasoline, affordable power bills, good-paying jobs, schools that allow their children to be competitively educated, safety in their neighborhoods.

And the idea that they should have some natural antipathy for illegal aliens just because they share the same language and maybe ethnic background—they don’t. They’re just like anybody else that’s trying to make a living and has been ignored and shunned by the grandees of the Democratic Party.

And so, they’re expressing support for an administration that is trying to get affordable energy prices, that is damning the high rise in crime, that is seeking to close the border and secure it, that is calling account the elite universities that gouge the federal government.

All of that appeals to people who have to work with their muscles. And many of the Hispanic community, they’re contractors or small business people. Many of them are professionals. But they have a more realistic, as all immigrant communities do, a realistic appraisal of what’s important and what’s peripheral. And right now, the Democratic Party is peripheral to the Hispanic community in general.

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