Carlos Trujillo’s career hasn’t centered around mobilizing Latino voters, but that’s the task Donald Trump’s campaign has given him. Trujillo is the campaign’s senior Cuban-American adviser on Latino issues and one of President Trump’s chief Latino surrogates, seeking to consolidate and even expand on the gains the Republican Party has made with Latinos in recent years. We are working on this. Before President Joe Biden withdrew from the race in July, his approval ratings among Latinos were declining. A Times-Siena poll from earlier this year suggested he might even lose the Latino vote. Latinos are more excited about Kamala Harris, but she’s still a little behind in the polls compared to Biden in 2020, and her approval rating has already dropped to Hillary Clinton’s in 2016. It was lower than Latino support and lower than support for Barack Obama. In 2012.
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Meanwhile, Trump is slightly ahead of where he was in 2020, even though the Harris campaign has spent more than 20 times as much on Hispanic media in recent months and Trump’s ground game pales in comparison. It’s progressing. Trujillo and others close to the former president say trusted local residents, rather than unknown campaign volunteers, are helping to get Trump’s message across. They added that he has an edge on policy issues important to Latinos (economy, immigration, security) and that Latinos tend to be late anyway. Basically, they think Harris is wasting their time and money.
Like Trujillo’s family, many of the Latinos the Trump campaign is focusing on – the people it needs help with – come from working-class backgrounds, are devoutly religious, and are These are first- and second-generation Latino Americans who fear authoritarian governments like this one. left behind by them or their parents. When I asked Trujillo, whom I met last summer at the Republican National Convention, about the irony that people fleeing dictatorships seem prepared to lend support to an apparent would-be dictator, he said: He answered as follows. “Dictators never leave office. Dictators persecute political opponents and their supporters and weaponize institutions. Trump never did that. Democrats do.”
Trujillo’s family came to the United States in the mid-1960s, a few years after Fidel Castro came to power. His maternal grandmother told him that she and his grandfather had to agree not to return to Cuba. He said: “They walked to the airport with just the clothes on their backs and that was it. Not their wedding rings. Not their family portraits. Not their Bibles. Everything was confiscated by the Communist Party.” Both sides of her family came to Spain from Cuba, but they arrived in the United States a few months later and became citizens. His mother’s family went to New York City, where they opened a furniture and jewelry store. His father’s family settled across the river in Union City, New Jersey, where they started a similar business. Trujillo’s parents met in New York. He was born there in 1983, and his family, including all four of his grandparents, moved to Florida just before his fifth birthday.
In Miami, Trujillo’s mother and father owned a small furniture store. Trujillo remembers that the two worked around the clock, including nights and weekends, and divorced within a few years. “They were just hard-working middle-class Americans who were pretty apathetic about politics,” he told me. “I think they were fiscally and socially conservative, but there was no news in the house and they didn’t talk much about politics. They didn’t say who they voted for. I didn’t, but then I moved on.” This was not the case for my maternal grandparents, who were immersed in the politics of the Cuban exile community. Trujillo spent much of his time at home, he recalled, “playing Radio Mambi really loud,” a longtime staple for Miami’s conservative Cuban listeners. “We woke up, we prayed, we put on Radio Manbi. That was our daily routine.” Although his grandparents spoke little English, they became “very proud Americans” and his political views Trujillo said it had a huge impact. The exile community “meant everything to me,” he added, and decided early on to pursue a career in civil service.
Miami, where Trujillo grew up, was a very special place. He attended Belém Jesuit Preparatory School, an all-boys high school founded in Havana in 1854 by King Isabel II of Spain. Mr. Castro was an alumnus and closed the school shortly after taking power. In 1961, he confiscated the school’s property, expelled the Jesuit faculty from Cuba, and quickly reopened the school in Miami. Years later, when Trujillo was a student, some of his teachers were classmates of Castro. There were about 120 students in his graduating class, he told me. He estimated that 98 to 99 percent were Hispanic, with only a small percentage of them non-Cuban. He never thought of himself as a minority, he said, mainly because almost everyone around him was of Cuban descent.
Mr. Trujillo left Miami to attend Jesuit University in Mobile, Alabama, and then studied law at Florida State University. After graduating, he accepted a job as a prosecutor in the State Attorney’s Office, which he called “the best job I’ve ever had.” He said he worked long hours and “did a lot of good deeds that directly impacted people’s lives.” However, he understood that prosecutors do not shape the law, but primarily implement it and respond to it. So in 2010, he decided to run for state representative in Miami to represent a heavily Latino district. Trujillo, 27, won with nearly 100 percent of the vote. That same year, Marco Rubio was elected to the U.S. Senate, and the two, both from the same community, became acquainted. Jeb Bush, who had left the Florida governor’s post at that point to work in the financial industry, was still the biggest name in Florida’s Republican Party and supported Trujillo in his successful 2012 reelection bid. Trujillo was an early supporter of Herman Cain in that year’s presidential election. Mitt Romney “was a very conventional person. It was just, ‘This is what Republicans should do. We’re for big business, we’re for big insurance, we’re for big business.’ ” was all he said. And, you know, that didn’t resonate with me. ”
When the 2016 presidential campaign began, Trujillo was prepared to support either Bush or Rubio. Trump “was not a factor,” he said. But things quickly changed as Mr. Trump finished second in Iowa and continued to win the nomination in New Hampshire, South Carolina, Nevada and, a few weeks later, Florida. (Mr. Trump received 46% of the vote there, Mr. Rubio came in second with 27%, and Mr. Bush came in fifth with 2%.) Many of Mr. Trump’s statements, including his restrictive opinions of the candidates, This resonated with Trujillo. Position on immigration. Mr. Trujillo has proposed a bill that would make it a felony for deported immigrants to re-enter Florida, and he also supports a bill proposed by another Republican state lawmaker that would require the governor to The law allowed certain immigrants to be excluded from Florida. situation. (Neither bill passed, and President Trujillo later distanced himself from a revised version of the bill that was more expansive than he had intended.) After stumbling to support Bush in New Hampshire in January 2016, he changed his policy. After the presidential election, he announced his support for Trump. A primary election was held in South Carolina in late February, making him the first candidate for the Florida House of Representatives. Trujillo told me he hasn’t spoken to Bush since 2016.
Trujillo explained his support to reporters by saying he believes Trump’s message “resonates with the vast majority of American voters.” He also concluded that Republicans are at a crossroads and “could choose between two options.” We either continue down this path of high society, country clubs, and big business, or we reinvent ourselves as the party of the masses, the party of the American people. Trump was the first to strike a nerve. He started coming out about marginalized workers and showing how globalization is good for some people but very bad for many others. ” But despite Trujillo’s admiration for Trump, endorsing Trump was not an obvious decision. “The conventional wisdom is that you can’t support Trump because it would end your career,” Trujillo said. The advantage was that Trujillo was given more opportunities than in other campaigns. He raised money for Trump, voted for Trump as a Florida delegate at the Republican National Convention, and was appointed to Trump’s Hispanic Advisory Council. At an event he hosted, he presented Trump with a guayabera, a traditional shirt worn throughout Latin America, and said he hoped Trump would wear it in Miami. Mr. Trujillo remains surprised that he was close to Mr. Trump from an early age. “I didn’t have the money, family, or strength to participate in such a scenario,” he told me. “But I was kind of representative of the class he was chasing.”
