Trump’s team launched the new White House website on Friday. It has no Spanish-language content.
Under the Obama administration, visitors to whitehouse.gov could search ‘en Español’. Try that today and you’ll come to an error page.
The new president made it clear during his primary campaign what he thought about elevating any other language to national importance. When former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush spoke Spanish on his campaign trail, Trump chastised him.
“W have a country where to assimilate, you have to speak English,” Trump said during a September 2015 debate. “We have to have assimilation to have a country,” he added. “This is a country where we speak English, not Spanish.’
U.S. English, the nation’s most vocal advocate of making English the official language of the United States, is headed by Mauro Mujica, its chairman and CEO. Mujica says the Trump administration shouldn’t give Spanish-speakers any special dispensation.
“There are 323 languages spoken in the United States,” he said. “Spanish shouldn’t get any special treatment. . . . English is the de-facto official language of this country.”
R. Frapal, of Modesto, CA, said the decision to move away from embracing Spanish as a second language in America was long past due.
“God bless Donald Trump for doing what should’ve been done decades ago. My wife became a citizen but had to pass a written test in English and had to have a working knowledge of American History. People from SOUTH of the border can do the SAME!!!!!!!”
Axel DeLagardelle, from sarcastically cryptically (and maybe sarcastically, but maybe not): “Yes! Make America white again.”
Trump lost the Hispanic vote by a significant 65-29 margin, but those losses occurred in non-battleground states like Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas, and they made up only about 11 percent of voters who voted.
Among all candidates, Trump most noticeably made no serious effort to reach out to Spanish-speaking voters in their native language. At the Republican National Convention his team waved signs meant to say ‘Hispanics for Trump,’ but it was clear that little effort was placed into the signs. The signs read: “Hispanics para Trump,” instead of the more grammatically correct “Hispaños por Trump.”
Christine Parker, headteacher of the 450-pupil Gladstone Primary School in Peterborough, England, would probably be horrified by this retreat from bilingualism. As Parker puts it, “Not only is most of the world bilingual, a lot of the world is multilingual. We [English] are the odd ones out. When I was working in Pakistan, many of our friends spoke five, six, seven languages. We tend to have a fear about language but different languages bring different ways of seeing the world.”
