We should use Trump’s Latino supporters as a teaching moment to show how dividing “communities” is used indiscriminately to enrich the oligarchy further.
Trump’s Latino supporters exposed a cultural disease.
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Summary
Trump’s Latino base is awakening to the reality that the former president’s nativist crusade always targeted them too, exposing how the pathology of white supremacy metastasizes across communities and weaponizes cultural insecurities for oligarchic gain.
- Trump launched his political rise with the slur that Mexican migrants are “bringing drugs… crime… rapists,” a message that normalized scapegoating of all brown immigrants.
- NBC-featured Cuban, Venezuelan, and Nicaraguan voters in Miami now admit they “were used” after deportation raids reached their own families.
- The Marshall Project has logged more than 500 separate Trump statements falsely linking immigrants to crime, reinforcing a narrative disproven by decades of criminology.
- Pew’s 2024 validated-voter survey shows Trump nearly split the Hispanic vote, illustrating how racialized appeals can override material self-interest when unchallenged.
- Structural racism functions as a divide-and-conquer engine that depresses wages and wealth for all working people while enriching a narrow elite.
Progressives must meet this moment by confronting the lure of pseudo-whiteness, replacing it with a politics of shared prosperity and multiracial solidarity that deprives oligarchs of their favorite wedge.
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Trumpism thrives because it converts centuries-old white-supremacist myths into modern campaign fuel. On the escalator in 2015, Donald Trump distilled that myth into a single soundbite, accusing Mexican migrants of importing crime and sexual violence. From that moment forward, every rally chant, executive order, and tweet reinforced the lie that darker-skinned newcomers constitute an existential threat. The Marshall Project counted more than 560 such statements, demonstrating both the scale and the deliberate repetition of the smear. Repetition matters: Behavioral research shows that familiar falsehoods feel true, especially when mainstream outlets rebroadcast them uncritically.
Yet dog whistles alone cannot win elections; Trump requires willing listeners. In 2024, he found them among a surprising slice of the Latino electorate. Pew Research Center documents that Hispanic men narrowly favored him, while overall Latino support climbed to 48 percent, nearly parity with Vice President Harris. Why would descendants of colonized and enslaved peoples embrace a candidate who launched his career by smearing their kin? The answer lies in what writer Ian Haney López calls the “politics of racial manipulation”: offer marginalized groups honorary proximity to whiteness, promise protection from “bad immigrants,” and cloak the deal in entrepreneurial rhetoric about “getting ahead.”
NBC News’ Morgan Radford recently returned to Miami’s Cuban and Nicaraguan strongholds—the bedrock of this honorary-white coalition—and met voters stunned that ICE now pursues their relatives. “They used us,” one woman confessed, recognizing too late that Trump’s vow to purge “criminal aliens” was never a surgical strike. The tragedy is predictable. White supremacy operates like a metastasizing cancer: it spreads from its original host population into adjacent communities, incentivizing them to police still-darker, still-poorer neighbors to preserve a shrinking privilege. Afro-Latino voices, long marginalized within their own cultures, have warned about this contagion for decades, but mainstream political discourse has rarely amplified them.
The publisher of Daily Kos, Markos Moulitsas, wrote a recent article titled “Trump’s Latino supporters are learning the hard way: He meant every word,” where he admonished Latino gullibility. I left the following comment.
Hola Kos,
I honestly do not understand why anyone is surprised. Trump understands perfectly the illness within the “Latino” community. Let me first point out that I am a Black Latino from Panama.
In Latin America, until recently, we did not talk about race as is done in the USA. Interestingly, you can look at the racial/socioeconomic breakdown in EVERY Latin community in EVERY Latin country and understand that we have been living a lie down there by ignoring systemic problems we sweep under the rug. Recently, guided mainly by young afro-latinas, countries from Peru, to Venezuela, to Colombia, to Panama have been bringing the racial fraud in Latin America to the forefront.Latinos, even the darker ones, with their enslaved minds, allowed Trump to sell them a false adjacency to whiteness, where they had no problems voting against their own for what they thought would be acceptance.
I wrote a book titled “Tribulations of an Afro-Latino Caribbean man: Racism didn’t Stop My Smile, Hope, or Journey Forward” where I detailed a story of going to the University of Texas. When the son of one of the ministers in the Panamanian government came to the university, I had him under my wings. He was a white Latino. Eventually, he got invited into a white fraternity. When he saw me on campus, he would pretend not to see me, and it was clear he did not want his friends to know we were compatriots.That is what the disease of white supremacy does. It affects all of us. While we are happy to tell the Latinos that voted for Trump that they are gullible, self-hating, immoral, those who voted for Trump to rid us of immigrants are hurting themselves too, as the price of homes, produce, and much more goes up.
I am trying with all of my platforms to promote the notion, the truth that racism is a tool of the rich, irrespective of race, to maintain an economic system where the few enrich themselves on the backs of the many. And white people in the aggregate are harmed the most by it, but it is simply not advertised.
Economic context makes the manipulation easier. Since the Reagan era, real wages have stagnated while productivity and profits soared. Communities compete for scraps, and demagogues redirect that frustration toward scapegoats. The Center for American Progress shows that the racial wealth gap, created by policy choices from slavery to redlining, persists today: the typical white family holds eight times the wealth of the typical Black family and five times that of the typical Latino family. When Trump blames an undocumented laborer for economic anxiety, he obscures the corporate boardroom that pockets the gains of suppressed wages.
Progressives cannot defeat this strategy with moral outrage alone; they must build a counter-narrative rooted in material solidarity. First, expose the scam. Latino, Black, Asian, Indigenous, and white working-class voters all lose when union rights are gutted, when the minimum wage stalls, when the “Big Beautiful Bill” threatens Medicaid and nutrition assistance. Trump’s tax cuts delivered 83 percent of benefits to the top 1 percent, not to the kitchen tables in Hialeah or the colonias along the Rio Grande. Second, elevate voices from within the targeted communities—Afro-Latinas challenging colorism, labor organizers fighting wage theft, immigrant-led mutual-aid networks, which embody the alternative future.
Third, refuse to silo struggles. The same ICE infrastructure terrorizing Nicaraguan mothers also intimidates South Asian asylum seekers; the same voter-suppression laws aimed at Black precincts in Georgia complicate naturalization drives in Texas; the same corporate landlords inflating rents in Phoenix evict white retirees in Appalachia. Intersectional storytelling disrupts the illusion of zero-sum racial competition and reveals the real adversary: a donor class that treats human beings as interchangeable units of profit.
Finally, policy must match rhetoric. Universal childcare, Medicare for All, and a Green New Deal do more than improve lives; they undercut the economic desperation that makes scapegoating persuasive. When every community can see tangible gains from progressive governance, the siren song of Trumpist grievance loses volume.
Trump’s Latino supporters now confront a painful lesson: adjacency to whiteness offers no shield against a movement defined by perpetual exclusion. Their awakening, however, can spark a broader inoculation. By naming white supremacy as the ever-mutating disease and radical solidarity as the cure, progressives light a path toward an America in which no one’s dignity is negotiable and the oligarchy’s favorite weapon finally loses its edge.
