Donald Trump, a real-estate tycoon, reality television star, and xenophobic racist, became the presumptive Republican nominee Tuesday night after his primary competitor, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), lost Indiana’s primary and dropped out.
Trump, who has made xenophobia and anti-immigrant fearmongering core tenets of his campaign, is already inspiring immigrants to become citizens in order to vote for anyone but him. A recent poll of Latino voters showed his candidacy is making them more determined than ever to hit the polls to vote against him in November.
The revulsion against the casino mogul’s anti-immigrant rhetoric will likely spur a backlash against the Republican Party that nominated him for years to come. Just take the Republican Party’s own word for it.
After President Obama won reelection in 2012, Republicans commissioned a massive report to look into why the party lost the White House. The report warned that GOP support from Latinos, a fast-growing and necessary-to-win demographic, had dropped so low that the party was in danger of falling out of step with the changing general electorate. The report concluded Republicans must immediately change their platform and embrace immigration reform in order to salvage their chances in future general elections.
“We are not a policy committee, but among the steps Republicans take in the Hispanic community and beyond, must be to embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform,” the report read. “If we do not, our Party’s appeal will continue to shrink to its core constituencies only.”
So all eyes turned to 2016. The party began looking for its next emerging star. Would it be a young Latino, like Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), who could invigorate his own demographic and who has previously worked across the aisle to pass immigration reform in the Senate? Or someone like former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R), who speaks Spanish, has also embraced immigration reform, and whose wife is Latino.
Then came Trump.
Trump, who began his campaign by name-calling immigrants, has called for the mass deportation of the country’s 11.3 million undocumented population, a blanket ban and surveillance of Muslims, and a 2,000-mile long border wall paid for by Mexico. And his words have inspired supporters to hit, grab, spit on, kick, and hurt immigrant supporters and Latinos across the country.
When Trump became the presumptive nominee on Tuesday night, the GOP’s autopsy report recommendations went out the window – for this election, and maybe many more for years to come. Trump has turned off Latino voters so deeply that one GOP strategist told ThinkProgress he will doom the GOP for “at least a generation.”
For his part, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, who also just recently called for the party to make inroads with Latinos or risk shutting out voters for years to come, said……
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