Lest you thought that maybe Donald “I love Hispanics!” Trump got slapped by an angel while throwing paper towels at the people of Puerto Rico earlier this week, today Trump once again demonstrated his utter contempt for the Latinx community—at an event celebrating National Hispanic Heritage Month.
As ABC News social-media chief Dan Linden posted on Twitter, in the midst of a speech full of his usual banana-republic-meets-tent-revival rhetoric, Trump showed his “love” for Puerto Rico in the same way that a freshman liberal-arts major does for Japan or France or wherever after a semester of studying abroad: By aggressively over-pronouncing the name of the beleaguered Caribbean island.
“PUerto Rico. We love PUerto Rico,” Trump said, really leaning in to the first syllable of the word as the crowd laughed. “We also love Puerto Rico,” he added, all folksy real American-like, to the visible discomfort of his wife Melania, who speaks English as a second language. She also speaks French, Italian, German, Serbo-Croatian, and Slovene, all of which her husband probably mocks her for in private.
As Politico reports, Trump went on to say that “I know some of them,” referring to Latinx people, “and believe me, they’re very tough and they’re very smart. Sometimes they’re too tough. But that’s okay. I have to deal with it. I have to deal with it. Fantastic people.” As far as we can tell, he declined to use the word “spicy,” but we wouldn’t put it past him.