MIAMI, Florida (AP) — Donald Trump on Tuesday described his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris, as “lazy," railed against green energy and talked about “extreme" presidential power during a campaign event promoted as a business economic roundtable aimed at Latino voters.
Trump mentioned the economy only in passing during remarks at his golf club in Doral, a Miami suburb, and instead used his time to roll through familiar grievances, including the current administration's handling of the border.
Insisting President Joe Biden did not need congressional approval to curb illegal immigration, he said: “As president, you have tremendous — it’s called extreme power. You have extreme power."
Trump also continued to hammer Harris as “low IQ” and invoked a racist trope, calling her “lazy as hell” for not holding any public events on Tuesday. She was in Washington for meetings and was scheduled for TV interviews with Telemundo and NBC after more than two straight weeks of campaigning.
“Who the hell takes off when you have 14 days left?” he said.
Harris planned to highlight during the Telemundo event what her campaign suggests is a plan to create more opportunities for Latino men — a strategy born out of roughly a dozen focus groups and polling.
The Democratic nominee intended to show off her plans to double the number of registered apprenticeships. She wants to stress how she would remove college degree requirements for certain federal government jobs and encourage private employers to do likewise. Harris also wants to provide forgivable loans worth up to $20,000 each to 1 million small businesses.
During Trump's event, he sat after his opening remarks as elected officials and business leaders who are Latino praised the economy during his administration, thanking him specifically for tax cuts he signed in 2017.
Later, he claimed that he had recently seen a solar field “that looked like it took up half the desert.”
“It’s all steel and glass and wires. And it looks like hell,” he says. “You see rabbits, they get caught in it.” Trump often rails against wind power, claiming the turbines “kill all the birds” and confuse whales.
At the close of the event, Latino faith leaders prayed over Trump, his head bowed as some placed their hands on his shoulders. Guillermo Maldonado, senior pastor of King Jesus International Ministry, said during the prayer that "there’s a higher assignment for him to finish with this nation.”
The Trump and Harris campaigns see what could be an election-deciding opportunity with Latino men, who could swing the outcome in states such as Pennsylvania, Arizona and Nevada if their traditional support for Democrats erodes. Trump believes he's made inroads among Latino men. Harris' team is seeking to shore up support within the same group with the election just two weeks away.
The effort sets up a question of whether memories of a Trump presidency or the promise of new policies under Harris will do more to energize Latino voters.
”We are very confident that these policies resonate because we’ve seen them resonate in speeches and focus groups,” said Matt Barreto, a Harris campaign pollster. “It speaks to Latino men in particular about being successful and achieving the American dream.”
In 2020, AP VoteCast found that 9% of voters nationwide identified as Latino, and 63% of them backed Biden in the election. That race was defined broadly by the pandemic that shut down much of the country, whereas this year’s race has issues such as the economy, immigration, abortion rights and democracy at the forefront.
Both campaigns were jockeying for an edge with the increasingly diverse electorate in the closing weeks of the campaign. Harris has also focused on Black men, to whom she also pitched the forgivable loans for small businesses. She went on the podcast “Call Her Daddy” to appeal to younger women, while Trump has appeared on podcasts to target younger men.
In a close race, the Harris campaign is betting that Latino men are getting more attuned to policy specifics as the election draws closer.
Based on focus groups, Barreto said the Harris campaign found that Latino men in particular wanted access to apprenticeships that could give people without college degrees access to a financially stable career.
The latest Labor Department figures show there are 641,044 registered apprenticeships, an increase from the Trump administration, when apprenticeships peaked in 2020 at 569,311. Doubling that figure as Harris has proposed would put the total number of apprenticeships at roughly 1.2 million over four years.
Latino men also expressed a need for access to capital and credit to start companies, as the Treasury Department reported on Oct. 10 that Latino business ownership is up 40% over pre-pandemic levels and could keep climbing with better financing options.
Harris' running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, will be on Univision’s “El Bueno, La Mala, y El Feo,” a syndicated radio show, this week, while Harris' husband, Doug Emhoff, will be interviewed this week by Univision’s nationally syndicated afternoon radio program “El Free-Guey Show.” Emhoff will also be interviewed by Alex “El Genio” Lucas on Nueva Network Radio.
Trump hopes to convince Latinos that they can trust a fellow businessman such as himself, even as he's also called for the mass deportation of immigrants in the country illegally.
“Hispanic people — they say you can’t generalize, but I think you can — they have wonderful entrepreneurship and they have — oh, do you have such energy. Just ease up a little bit, OK? Ease up,” Trump said at an Oct. 12 event. “You have great ambition, you have great energy, very smart, and you really do like natural entrepreneurs.”
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Boak reported from Washington. Beaumont reported from Des Moines, Iowa. Associated Press writers Adriana Gomez Licon and Stephany Matat in Miami and Kevin Freking and Alana Durkin Richer in Washington also contributed to this report.
Josh Boak, Jill Colvin And Thomas Beaumont, The Associated Press
