Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump slammed his favorite punching bag, Jeb Bush, for speaking Spanish on the campaign trail.
“I like Jeb,” Trump told Breitbart News on Wednesday. “He’s a nice man. But he should really set the example by speaking English while in the United States.”
Trump was responding to a recent campaign stop where Bush attacked Trump by saying, “El hombre no es conservador,” which is Spanish for “the man is not conservative.” Jeb went on to say, “Besides, he tries to personalize everything. If you’re not totally in agreement with him you’re an idiot, or stupid, or don’t have energy, or blah blah blah.”
This insistence that the former Florida governor, who has bragged about speaking more Spanish than English at home and is married to a woman originally from Mexico, speak English and only English seems to be a dog whistle to Trump’s base. The call for Bush to speak English was repeated by conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh on Wednesday as well.
Conservative radio has roundly embraced Trump, who mentioned in his announcement speech that Mexican immigrants tend to mostly be drug smugglers and “rapists.”
The movement to make English the official language of the United States of America, known as the Official English movement or the English-only movement, is often driven by right-wing conservatives and nativists who use anti-immigration sentiments to justify mandating official documents be printed in English. This movement particularly picked up steam in the 1990s, when Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich denounced bilingualism as a “menace to American civilization” and passed the Language of Government Act, which later died in the Senate. Many states followed suit, passing English as the official language laws on the state level. Iowa, the earliest primary state, has adopted English as its official language.
One of the state legislators who voted for the bill was Rep. Steve King (R-IA), who now serves in Congress. He was once caught on video insisting to an immigration activist, “You’re very good at English. You can understand the English language so don’t act like you don’t.”