Donald J. Trump addressed a town hall audience of undecided Latino voters for Univision Wednesday in Miami, and it’s safe to say that, judging by the crowd’s expressions, he didn’t win their support. Trump tried and failed to defend his baseless pet-eating allegations, which have rocked Springfield, Ohio.
Ramiro González, a construction worker and a Republican voter, politely gave the former President the “opportunity to try to win back my vote,” explaining that he wondered why Trump “waited so long to take action” during the deadly Jan. 6 riots.
“Okay, your, let me say, action and maybe inaction during your presidency and the last few years, sort of, you know, was a little disturbing to me,” González said. “You know, what happened during Jan. 6 and the fact that you know, you waited so long to take action while your supporters were attacking the Capitol.”
“Coronavirus, I thought we were, the public was misled during coronavirus and that many, many more lives could have been saved if we would have been informed better,” he continued. “And also people in your administration who don’t support you. I’m curious how people so close to you and your administration no longer want to support you.”
“So why would I want to support you?” he asked. “If you would answer these questions for me, I would really appreciate it and give you the opportunity. There’s, you know, your own vice president doesn’t want to support you now.”
Things got weird.
“So the people that don’t support, a very small portion, we have a tremendous, about 97% of the people in the administration support me,” Trump insisted. “But because it’s me, somebody doesn’t support, they get a little publicity.”
“The vice president, I disagree with him on what he did,” Trump said. “I totally disagreed with him on what he did. Very importantly, you had hundreds of thousands of people come to Washington. They didn’t come because of me. They came because of the election.”
“They thought the election was a rigged election, and that’s why they came,” he said. “Some of those people went down to the Capitol. I said, peacefully and patriotically, nothing done wrong at all, nothing done wrong. And action was taken, strong action.”
“Ashley Babbitt was killed, nobody was killed, Trump said as if that makes any sense. “There were no guns down there; we didn’t have guns. The others had guns, but we didn’t have guns.”
“And when I say we, these are people that walked down,” he continued. “This was a tiny percentage of the overall, which nobody sees and nobody shows. But that was a day of love from the standpoint of the millions, it’s like hundreds of thousands.”
“They asked me to speak, I went, and I spoke,” he insisted. “And I used the term peacefully and patriotically. If you look at the Democrats, what they say, you look at Maxine Waters, and you look at Hillary Clinton.”
It took off online:
Trump said, “We,” referring to the insurrectionists, but when he said, “The others had guns,” he was referring to the police who were beaten with flagpoles by his unruly mob of supporters. Interesting.
