Conservatives of color have lofty expectations for Trump's second term

[January 25, 2025]  By MATT BROWN

WASHINGTON (AP) — Delivering his first address as a reinaugurated president, Donald Trump spoke directly to communities that had historically shunned his party.

“To the Black and Hispanic communities, I want to thank you for the tremendous outpouring of love and trust that you have shown me with your vote,” Trump said. “We set records, and I will not forget it. I’ve heard your voices in the campaign, and I look forward to working with you in the years to come.”

Trump, whose inauguration coincided with the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, promised to “strive together to make his dream a reality.” It’s a vow that many prominent Black and Hispanic civil rights leaders view skeptically. But among the conservatives of color who surround Trump, the moment was an endorsement of their biggest hopes, years in the making.

“This room was impossible twenty years ago,” Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla., said Sunday evening during the “Legacy of Freedom Ball," a gala of a few hundred mostly Black conservatives who gathered to ring in the new administration. “But in 2024 not only are we back, but we’re bringing Black people and Hispanic people into the Republican Party," Donalds told the crowd.

Trump’s comments alluded to the record margins he garnered among heavily Black and Hispanic regions of the country compared to past Republican presidential candidates. At galas preceding Trump's inauguration, conservative Black and Hispanic activists and lawmakers toasted to a new era in which many of them hope to play a larger role than in Trump's first term.

“There’s so much that we expect from the president, and I believe he’s going to deliver,” said Virginia Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, an outspoken conservative who is running to become the state’s first Black and female governor.

Earle-Sears listed stricter immigration policies, cracking down on crime and reducing the federal government’s role in education as priorities she believed would speak to Black Americans. “Let’s just give him a chance,” she said.

The revelry came after a year of bifurcated messaging from the Trump campaign, which invested in appeals to Black and Hispanic voters while at the same time depicting immigrants and communities of color as violent criminals and the country as beset by diversity and inclusion policies that conservatives view as weakening the nation.

But Trump's divisive messages on “Black jobs” and “Hispanic jobs” spoke to a view of the economy and society that found salience with some voters, including voters of color, on top of concerns over inflation, rapid technological change and geopolitical unrest abroad.

Trump gained a larger share of Black and Latino voters than he did in 2020, when he lost to Democrat Joe Biden — most notably among young Black and Hispanic male voters — according to AP VoteCast, a nationwide survey of more than 120,000 voters.

Overall, about 16% of Black voters supported Trump in November, while about 8 in 10 voted for Democrat Kamala Harris. But that represented a shift from 2020 when only 8% of Black voters backed Trump and about 9 in 10 went for Biden. Among Hispanic voters, 43% voted for Trump in November, up from about one-third in 2020.

Black women are largely the exception to this shift – about 9 in 10 Black female voters supported Harris in 2024, similar to the share that backed Biden in 2020.

At the Hispanic Inaugural Ball the Saturday before Trump's inauguration, GOP members of Congress, state lawmakers and governors mingled with conservative activists and business executives from across the Western Hemisphere.

Latin American leaders like Argentinian President Javier Milei and Paraguayan President Santiago Peña rubbed elbows with Republican members of Congress, including Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar, Mexican actors and Hispanic business executives. Vivek Ramaswamy, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott all made appearances.

“I don’t think Trump gets enough credit for listening and tailoring his policies in part to what people want in these communities.” said Francis Suarez, mayor of Miami. Suarez, who leads a city that is overwhelmingly Hispanic and sits at the nexus of the U.S. and Latin America, said Trump can maintain his support among Hispanic voters “and grow it again. It just goes back to the basics.”

Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla., arrives before the 60th Presidential Inauguration in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, Monday, Jan. 20, 2025. (Kenny Holston/The New York Times via AP, Pool)

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz rallied gala attendees by recounting the November election, in which many majority-Hispanic counties in his home state that had traditionally backed Democrats flipped to Trump. Cruz, who trailed Trump in many of those same counties as he ran for reelection, called the GOP’s inroads with Hispanic voters “unprecedented.”

“The Rio Grande Valley has been bright blue for 100 years. Well, I’m here to tell you the Rio Grande Valley flipped red,” said Cruz, who is Hispanic. “That is a generational change for Texas, and it is a generational change for America.”

Other lawmakers took time to pitch a forward-looking vision.

“I think the biggest thing is that we’re beginning to recognize we’re Americans first. We have different backgrounds, but always share the same dreams. And that’s what’s happening across the board,” said Rep. Burgess Owens, R-Utah, in an interview with The Associated Press. Owens is one of four Black Republicans in the House of Representatives.

Sen. Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio, who was born in Bogotá, Colombia, rejected stereotypes of Hispanics as solely laborers or immigrants and asked the crowd to envision the country after the four years of Trump's term.

"In four years, America will understand the positive impact of the Hispanic community. And we're going to build an alliance between a free South America, a prosperous South America and a strong, free and prosperous United States of America,” Moreno said.

“That's what we're going to get done over the next four years and it's going to be the Hispanic community that makes it happen.”

Black conservatives are energized as well. The GOP did not add any new Black members to Congress this cycle, but activists are hoping to change that in the 2026 midterms. And Donalds, a Florida Republican and one of the most prominent Black surrogates for Trump on the campaign trail, joked to attendees to “keep quiet” about his ambition for higher office — speakers throughout the night referred to him as “Governor Donalds.”

The commingling scenes and aspirations were no accident.

Conservative groups like Bienvenido and the Black Conservative Federation, which hosted the balls, had worked for years behind the scenes to build up conservative Black and Hispanic organizing networks. And Trump's orbit has fostered friendly ties with Latin American's political right, most notably in Trump's friendship with then-Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro's wife attended Trump's inauguration.

Argentina's Milei “and I were friends before he was elected president,” said Roger Stone, a longtime Trump confidant. ”We were pen pals, you know, over the internet. I’m a strong believer in him.”

Some in Trump's orbit hope Secretary of State Marco Rubio will deepen America's ties to right-wing Latin American leaders in the coming years.

The exuberance of the night reflected a desire among many Hispanic conservatives to solidify the party's inroads with Hispanic voters and increase their clout in the GOP.

“We’re growing exponentially," said Jaime Florez, the Hispanic communications director for the Trump campaign.

And who knows? “The first Hispanic president of the United States might be here tonight,” he added.

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