The Daily Beast reports based on revelations shared by anonymous sources that Republicans are shutting down an initiative that previously put community centers aligned with the party in locales with high populations of minority/marginalized groups.
The developments correspond with a pro-Trump takeover in leadership at the Republican National Committee (RNC), where even the ex-president’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump is now co-chair.
The news publication described the target as an “initiative from the 2022 midterms where RNC field staff engaged voters through gatherings and events held at community centers in areas with heavy minority populations, most specifically Latino communities,” and reportedly, it was already somewhat dialed back ahead of the pro-Trump crowd’s ascent to institutional power among Republicans. The leading explanation is evidently a cost-cutting ambition, though it’s difficult not to pair the developments with Trump’s history of alleged racism.
He speaks in obsessively dramatic — and sometimes just bizarre — terms about migrants arriving to the United States from South America, for instance.
One of his recent lines has been the idea that some are speaking languages for which individuals in the U.S. just aren’t prepared. In an interview, the ex-president said migrants were “coming from parts unknown, countries that you’ve never heard of — languages that nobody in this country speaks. You know, we don’t even have teachers of some of these languages. Who would think that? We have languages that are like from the planet Mars.” It’s unclear what precisely he was even trying to say.
Other examples include Trump’s derisive and evidently intentional misspellings of former Cabinet Secretary Elaine Chao’s last name and his insistence on referring to COVID-19 as the “China virus.”
Although Republicans’ community center initiative seemingly didn’t get an overwhelming wave of attention, the centers were in use during the 2022 midterm elections… though Republicans fell short across the board in that year’s races. Democrats added to their Senate majority and won in key races for governor around the country.
