No Latino In The Donald Trump Administration

2024 Author: Steven Freeman | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 08:15

President-elect Donald Trump completed the selection of the members of his government cabinet, in which for the first time since 1988 there will be no Latino.

The nomination this Thursday of former Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue as Secretary of Agriculture a day before the inauguration of the new president ends the complicated process of forming the group of advisers who will lead the country in the new administration.

Like the vast majority of his fellow cabinet members, if confirmed by the Senate, Perdue is a man and a white detail that has not escaped critics of the magnate, who accuse him of forming a government that does not reflect diversity. from the country.

Trump spokesman Sean Spicer played down the absence of a Latino in the new administration. "[The new president] is here to serve everyone," he said, according to the Los Angeles Times. "What I think Americans should be looking at is itself against the best and the brightest, if it hires people who are committed to bringing about real change, respecting taxpayers, making a job-creating agenda a reality, and increasing wages”.

Spicer noted that the Trump administration will seek "gender diversity and diversity of thought and diversity in ideology."

"So it's not just, you know, skin color or ethnicity," he said, adding, to the question of whether there were no Latinos among the "best and brightest", that was not what he meant.

For lack of candidates it seems that it has not been, since in the lists of candidates to be part of the cabinet several Latinos have appeared. In fact, former Deputy Governor of California Abel Maldonado had been mentioned as a candidate for the position that Perdue has won, as well as former Deputy Secretary of Agriculture Elsa Murano.

Two other Latinos who could have been in the billionaire's government are Jovita Carranza, for the position of representative of the Commerce Office, and Luis Quiñonez, as secretary of the department of Veterans. Neither was finally selected, the EFE agency said.

The absence of Latinos has not fared well among associations of Latino rights advocates, particularly considering the insults to Mexican immigrants with which Trump began his campaign.

"What this obviously means is that you don't know Latinos," Arturo Vargas, executive director of the National Association of Latino Elected Officials (NALEO), told The Dallas Morning News. "Neither he nor his team knows who the Latino leaders are."