Trump gives Spanish speakers ‘un poquito’
Twitter feed less active than English account
WASHINGTON — The Trump White House no habla español. Well, un poquito.
After a succession of administrations that embraced Spanishlanguage content, President Donald Trump’s White House is all but ignoring Spanish speakers even though he has a robust online presence in English.
His administration has yet to offer a Spanish White House website. It has eliminated the position of director of Hispanic media outreach. And its Spanishlanguage Twitter account is heavy with English text and features sloppy translations.
White House press secretary Sean Spicer said in January that the administration had its “IT folks working overtime” to roll out a new Spanish language site after WhiteHouse.gov/espanol went dark in the hours after Trump took office.
“Trust me, it’s going to take a little bit more time, but we’re working piece by piece to get that done,” Spicer said at the time. More than five months later, the site still urges readers to “STAY TUNED.”
The White House’s Spanish twitter account, LaCasaBlanca, is also far less active in the Trump era.
The account has tweeted just 41 times since Trump’s inauguration; more than one-third of those posts came on the day of his address to a joint session of Congress on Feb. 28. Of the 41 tweets, about half were written in English. The Spanish tweets are sprinkled with typos — 11 in all. While most mistakes are minor flubs such as missing accents, those accents often change the meaning of words significantly. For instance, they turn “medical” into “medicate” or “is” into “this.”
Notably, one of the first agencies to expand Spanish-language content during the Trump era has been U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The agency better known as ICE is responsible for carrying out deportations. Last month, it announced that it was expanding the Spanish section of its website and started a new Spanish twitter feed, ICEespanol.
The White House director of media affairs, Helen Aguirre Ferre, said she expects a Spanish website to launch later this year. She noted the Obama administration took nine months to launch its version, adding that “the priority remains to improve the English language website.”
She said there was no plan to hire a press officer solely dedicated to Spanish-language media at this time. She said she and another staffer in the communications operation are bilingual and conduct interviews in Spanish. Spanish-language media are also invited to participate in press briefings, background briefings and other events, along with their Englishlanguage colleagues, she said.
Former President George W. Bush began the tradition of a Spanish-language website. The Obama administration followed suit.
Luis Miranda, director of Hispanic media at the White House during the Obama administration, said the Obama-era Spanishlanguage website was not just a translation of the English site, but included information geared to Latinos on topics such as immigration, health issues, banking and veterans affairs.
“For us it was important that all of our constituents across the board were getting as much information as possible about what we were doing,” he said.
Still, the Obama White House received some criticism for using Spanglish in its initial website on his health overhaul.
Activists see the lack of Spanish content as part of a larger pattern by Trump and the administration.
“I believe they have written off the Latino vote as, ‘I’m never going to get it, so why should I even bother?’ ” said Luis A. Miranda Jr., a Democratic strategist who has worked for Democrat Hillary Clinton as well as Republican Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York.