When Cuban-American sisters Annie and Ceci Cardelle learned that Eric Trump would be visiting their hometown in North Carolina to galvanize support for his father, they resolved to make a statement. The sisters, Hillary Clinton supporters, decided to attend the rally and protest the rhetoric the Trump campaign has used to describe Latino immigrants.
Before heading out of the house, Annie, 23, penned “Latina Contra Trump” in Sharpie on the front of a white tee shirt. She figured wearing this shirt to would clearly communicate her anti-Trump stance, and even got a bit nervous to debut it in a crowd of rabid Trump supporters. “Everyone there was so excited and I thought, ‘Gosh, they’re going to get so angry if I protest this,’” she told Buzzfeed.
But her nerves turned out to be completely unwarranted, because nobody in the crowd or on Team Eric Trump even noticed. “I thought ‘contra’ was pretty clear, but I guess not,” she said.
Even better, Annie was picked by Trump staffers to pose for a photo with Eric Trump and his wife. “I was sort of in disbelief when they actually called us forward,” Ceci, 17, said. “I was like, ‘This is not happening. There’s no way they don’t see this shirt.’”
But given the Trump campaign’s dismal Latino outreach, it’s not at all surprising that no one at Friday’s North Carolina campaign spoke Spanish. According to a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, 80% of Latino voters view Trump negatively, putting him on track to have the least Latino support of any Republican nominee in modern history.
“I’m not exactly protesting his conservative ideology, but it’s more about his speech and his rhetoric that he uses to describe Hispanics and Latinos and just people of color in general,” Annie told the Salisbury Post. “In his speeches, he brings up people killed by immigrants, which there’s no basis that immigrants kill people more than everyday citizens. So, he’s contemplating that immigrants, and specifically Mexican and Hispanic immigrants, are criminals and murdering people.”