Much of the media analysis of former President Donald Trump’s visit to the South Bronx centers around whether it was electorally savvy or good campaign strategy. Little has been said about the outbreak of bigotry vomited over the airwaves subsequent to the rally.
Most representative of this is The View host Ana Navarro’s bilious exchange with CNN’s Jim Acosta, which at the time was covered by our very own Alex Christy (click “expand” to view transcript):
JIM ACOSTA: I mean, you and I’ve talked about this many times about his rhetoric, the rhetoric he uses to talk about migrants and so on and I just have to ask you, Ana, I mean, when you look at the poll numbers and you see, if you break out the demographics, Trump is doing better among Latinos. He is doing better among African American voters and it’s certainly is a threat to the president’s reelection campaign. Is there a disc— I mean what do you make of this disconnect.”
ANA NAVARRO: Well, a few things. One is I think America has a little bit of amnesia when it comes to Donald Trump and frankly being in a courtroom for the last 20 days, I think, has helped him because he’s not been out in rallies saying the stupid stuff he says and the incendiary, outrageous things he says on a daily basis. We’ve been focusing on Michael Cohen, we’ve been focusing on Stormy Daniels. We haven’t been focusing on the things that Donald Trump says. Another thing is, I think at this point in 2024, this is kinda baked in, people already know the guy’s a misogynist, they already know he’s a racist, they already know he says divisive things and they seem not to take him literally or seriously.
They think it’s, kind of, part of a clown act, entertainment and then the third thing, Jim, and this is the truth and you and I know this as Latinos, there are some Latino immigrants who forget they came here as immigrants and who want to shut the door behind them and, who think being anti-immigrant somehow is going to make them pass as more American, pass as whatever.
And that’s a very stupid attitude to have because what folks don’t realize is that when the guy drives thousands of miles to go hunt down Latinos in a Walmart in Texas. He doesn’t care when you came here he doesn’t care—
ACOSTA: Right.
NAVARRO: — what your accent is, what he’s looking for is “Does it look like me, does it sound like me?” That’s what he’s looking for.
ACOSTA: Yeah.
NAVARRO: So, you know, when people are anti-something, they’re not asking for your papers, they’re just anti-that group.
I find that the most telling part of this exchange is Acosta setting Navarro up by saying that they discussed “the disconnect” on other occasions. To be clear, “the disconnect” Acosta refers to is ongoing, and it is between Hispanics and the Democratic Party.
Once Acosta sets the segment up, Navarro goes into a word salad about alleged Trump amnesia, the ongoing trial, and eventually works her way to her toxic race reductionism which, quite frankly, sounds like a knockoff of the bile that fellow co-host Asunción Cummings Hostin regularly spits on The View.
We recently heard similar nonsense from race grievance merchant John Leguizamo, also while on The View. I will note for the record that Navarro performs this service while under the approving gaze of the white former Biden campaign and White House communications flack who revolving-doored her way over to CNN (Kate Bedingfield), which leads to further questions about who is really trying hard to “pass” here.
We’ve heard all of this before- the repulsive idea that central to Hispanic (or Latino) identity is this attachment to the left and to the entire leftwing policy pupu platter, starting with immigration. And that one is somehow a race-traitor for embracing different ideas or choosing to vote for a different party. Univision anchor Jorge Ramos said as much the morning after Election Night, 2016:
JORGE RAMOS: The only way to explain it is (that) immigrants or the children of immigrants that forgot their origins…
When you hear media types whining about Trump’s rally in the Bronx, or poo-pooing it, or deriding those who attended, what you are really hearing are the lamentations of scorned gatekeepers- those chosen not to represent the Hispanic community within media and elsewhere, but to represent the left to the Hispanic community. As you see more of this pattern becoming evident, and more polling showing Trump gaining significant support within the Hispanic community, expect more of those angry denunciations from self-appointed gatekeepers who find they don’t have the clout they thought they had.
Ana Navarro’s toxic word vomit was only the beginning.