A Hispanic pro-Donald Trump activist tried to do a bit of scaremongering on Thursday evening and it backfired. Badly.
Marco Gutierrez, the co-founder of ‘Latinos For Trump’, warned MSNBC viewers that if Hillary Clinton won the presidency there would be “taco trucks on every corner”. And for some reason he seems to think Americans would see that as a bad thing.
“My culture is a very dominant culture,” Gutierrez warned on ‘All In With Chris Hayes’. “And it’s imposing, and it’s causing problems. If you don’t do something about it, you’re gonna have taco trucks every corner.”
Because God forbid they should have easy access to low cost, nutritional and delicious food from another culture.
Needless to say, a lot of people are pretty psyched about the idea of being able to get one of America’s favourite foodstuffs so easily. Some even likened it to Republican president Herbert Hoover’s promise of “a chicken in every pot”.
The debate on Mexican influence in the United States has been raging ever since Trump announced his candidacy, with his flagship policy being the erection of a wall along the US’s 1,989 mile southern border with the central American state.
The concept of Trump’s “big, beatiful wall”, which became a key point for many of Trump’s anti-immigration followers, took a hit this week when the Republican presidential candidate was invited to a meeting with Mexican head of state Enrique Peña Nieto.
While Trump claimed the pair “didn’t discuss” where payment for the wall would come from, Peña Nieto said they did, and said it absolutely would not come from the Mexican government. This ran contrary to Trump’s claims throughout his presidential run, during which he often claimed he would use his business prowess to make Mexico pay for it.
After initially riding on his proposal for a border wall, Trump continued to alienate what little Latino support he had, referring to them as “rapists,” “criminals” and “killers,” belittling their heritage and “using them as props.”
All this makes it understandable that Trump supporters might think of “a taco truck on every corner” as a threatening ideal - but most people on the ground are fairly excited about the prospect.