Hello, listeners.

Welcome to another episode of the Jacob Shapiro Podcast.

Elo is back on the podcast.

He initially reached out to me because he was doing a lot of interviews in Wisconsin before and leading to the presidential election in the United States.

I tried to get him on the schedule in December and for obvious reasons, we had to fall off.

But I've stuck with him and he has stuck with me.

And so we talk about the election results in the United States in the context of how the Latino vote shifted, how it didn't shift, and then we zoom out from there and talk about what's happening in politics in the Americas in general.

So I hope you enjoy the episode.

I found this one amazingly informative and I find Elo to be.

I mean, all of our guests are completely brilliant and insightful, but for me, ELO brings a rare perspective that is really not out there in a lot of English language media.

So thank him for his time and his patience.

You can email me at Jacob Cognitive Investments if you've got any questions about anything.

Otherwise, cheers and see you out going listeners.

First of all, you should all personally write to Elo and thank him for his patience with me because I had to move this like three different times and he still likes me, he still thinks that I'm a good person.

So, elo, thank you for coming on the podcast and bearing with me in my crazy, stupid schedule.

I still like you.

Do you have a baby?

I do have a baby, yes.

Please feel relieved.

But the last time I had to move was not a result of the baby, it was a result of the US Healthcare system.

But let's not get me started on that hobby horse now.

That will drive us to a different conversation that we were.

Yeah, we don't want to go there.

So we're going to talk.

We have ambitions to talk about all of the Americas here today, but we're going to start with a little bit of your experience on the ground in Wisconsin around the recent 2024 presidential election.

And I think one of the most surprising things, and maybe it wasn't surprising to you because, you know, you're closer to this, but one of the most surprising things I think for most pollsters was just how well Trump did with the Latino vote.

I was actually digging into those numbers though, and it's a little more nuanced than that.

He didn't win a majority at all.

It was something like, I don't know, roughly around 40% maybe, which was a lot better than he did before, but it wasn't hugely good.

But if you Start breaking down into different demographic groups.

He did very well indeed.

So, for instance, Latino men under 40, 48% went for president Elect Trump.

That was a much bigger statistic than before.

Even among Latino women or younger Latina women, 32% voted for Trump.

That was higher than the 28%, sort of in the congressional elections in 2022, but still a relatively low number.

And I was also.

This is from Brookings, breaking down some of these results.

The age difference was pretty remarkable.

So among Latinos who are age 60 or older, there was really no gender difference between who they were voting for and 62% were voting for Harris.

Whereas when you start getting down into the 40 to 59 demographic, there's a 10% difference between Latino men and women and then an even more significant one, 16% difference between Latino men under 40 and Latino women under 40.

And it's so important because, I mean, I think people probably know this intuitively, but let's just say from the outset that we are talking about, you know, Hispanics make up roughly 65 million Americans.

There are eight.

There are many different Hispanic groups.

So it's not like they're all.

One the largest is Mexicans, but there's Puerto Ricans and Salvadorans and Dominicans and Cubans.

You go down the list.

I mean, there's lots of different populations here, so there's that complexity as well.

They're also an incredibly young population relative to most of the rest of the country.

I'm sure we'll talk about that, too.

But there are some stats to just kind of lead us off, and maybe you can talk to us a little bit about what your experience was in Wisconsin around the election, and we'll zoom out from there and talk about politics in general in the Americas.

Well, you have done half of the job for me.

Thank you so much.

Which leads us to what is happening.

I think that we have to change the rhetoric based on what you said about this common idea of why Latinos are becoming more Republican, which is.

I think that there are two issues to underscore based on the data that you gave.

The first one is it is not Latinos becoming Republican.

It's who are the Latinos who vote the Republican.

More than four, because Latinos is very diverse.

I, I divide this group in four different characteristics that the literature also back on.

It's like the first one is obviously the country where you come from, and there is a correlation of what is the country you come from.

But 65% of voters are.

Have Mexican origins.

Right.

And then you have, and usually they have been more Democrats than Puerto Ricans or Cubans, who are the second largest population, but with a huge difference in terms of numbers.

So this first, the second one is where they live, actually.

It is not the same to be a Mexican in Texas and a Mexican in Wisconsin.

It is not the same to be a Puerto Rican New York, a Puerto Rican Utah.

It is not the same to be a Cuban in Florida and a Cuban in Philadelphia.

Because it's about community also.

And it's about how you relate with a community that makes you be more Latino and how you socialize politically and social.

And obviously you're social.

The third one is, and it, it comes with what you said about youth.

The third one is generation in the U.S.

so you have like the first generation migrants, right?

You have then the first generation born here, second generation here.

And when you talk about Jews right now, you're talking about people who were born here, more likely they are first, second or even third generations here, which connects to this fourth idea, which is the migration story.

So the people I have interviewed, in many ways, most of them connect with the migration stories.

And the migration stories are very, very different.

So they could come by plane, doing a PhD and then become a professor, let's say story like mine.

But most of them have the, this hard, hard journey of coming by, by ground, traveling, walking, taking Greyhound to take from Texas to Wisconsin without speaking any English.

And this story actually transcend and travels beyond generations.

But then it fades away.

So the first generation born here, usually they will tell you, my parents came here to have a better situation, but this migration process connects them with the roots.

Second generation, third generation, this migration story fades away.

Their connections with Latin America fade away.

So I have a person who I interviewed that told me, and it will connect with another layer, which is I am a first Christian, second US Citizen and third Hispanic in this order.

And who do you think he voted for?

I would assume he voted for President Trump.

Exactly.

First he said, I am first Christian, second Jewish citizen, third Hispanic.

And you know when he said this, when I asked him, do you care about deportations?

And he said that, right?

So because your connections with your roots become less important for your life when you are with a family here who has been for many, many years.

So that is why youth, you can explain in some way that their connection to.

Now the next question is, why do you have Latin American roots would lead you to, to vote for any of these candidates?

And I would say again, it comes back to the idea of the migration story, because One of the targets of one of the candidates, President Trump, was migrants.

And those who have the story in their minds of how migration is not black or white, but it's a story of entrepreneurship.

For many of them, it's like, hey, don't touch migrants in that way.

But for those who are second, third generation and did not have this idea of migration in mind, it is easier for them to take this biased rhetoric about what migration is about, which is lazy people coming to the US to do crime.

Right.

So that is one of the explanations.

The other explanation, and I have to say that many women told me this, not men, obviously, is like, why?

I literally did this question, why you think that more men voted for Trump than women.

And I asked that to both men and women, Latino men and women in Wisconsin, and women said it's machismo.

So it is that.

So this is not rocket science.

It's like there is a rhetoric about men doing good in terms of economic opportunities and having control that worked.

And actually, if you go in a little bit, if you go yet to the nuance and academic discussion on it, I would say that what is happening is that we are framing freedom with the Latino community.

Framing freedom in a different way.

If you're a woman.

Freedom is not about economic freedom or opportunities only, is also about get rid of men, having control of yourself a lot.

It's like, I don't want men telling me what to do anymore.

This is very different from what you saw, for example, with white population, because white population in the U.S.

actually, one of the group that mostly voted for Trump was married women with children.

And that takes me to another conclusion that we have to be very clear about.

Even if we see that more Latinos voted for Trump and for the Republican Party, in comparison to 20 years before or 30 years before, I think the closest was Bush in 2004.

In terms of numbers, even if you say that those who voted for the anti establishment candidate, those who voted for the populist candidate were white population in the US and particularly white women.

So those who picked the populist dentist establishment are US Citizens who are white, not US Citizens who are Latinos.

So why is this important?

Because some people will say, yes, Latinos are voting for this anti establishment populism that they know in their countries.

No.

If election in this country was only Latino population, Kamala Harris would be the President of the United States.

So let's be careful about it.

Let's be careful about the statements and generalization about Latinos.

That being said, as I've Explained, there are some searching groups that voted for the Republican Party in general, from TRAM in specific, in a, in largest numbers than ever.

Men, young people, Christian, Latino, Christian.

The religion was very important.

It was critical in my research.

So in every single rally that I saw or event that I saw with the Latino population who are leaning Republican, Christ was present.

Yeah, well that makes me want to, because you mentioned Bush and I think it's worthwhile to talk about the statistics a little bit.

And also, as you point out, this is a big deal, but it's not unprecedented.

So Bush in 2004, he got 40% of the Latino vote versus 58% for John Kerry.

That's roughly the Harris Trump split.

So Harris got 56%, Trump got 42%.

The other sort of eye opening thing there is that Latino support for Republicans bottomed in 1996.

So in the 1996 election it was 72% for the Democrats, 21% from the Republicans.

And that was a steady decline from the mid-1980s.

In the mid-1980s it was actually more like it is today.

It was roughly 60, 40.

And then over that sort of 10, 15 year time horizon, it bottoms out at 21% in, in 2000.

That's really the election where things change.

When you have Gore versus Bush and the Latino support for Republicans goes from 21% to 35%.

And then in 2004, Bush adds another 5% and gets to 40%.

So the question I'm leading up to here is do you think that something fundamentally different is happening now versus what happened in 2004?

Or is.

Is it something like you had an evangelically.

Evangelically, can I use that as an adjective?

An evangelical backed president in George Bush, certainly Bush had more machismo than Al Gore and than John Kerry, both of whom were not exactly wouldn't fit the machismo dynamic at all, whereas George Bush absolutely could.

Is it sort of a replay of those dynamics or is something fundamentally different happening?

And does that data sort of overshadow the fact that something has changed?

Let's remember, where is Bush from in.

The U.S.

well, he claims Texas is his home.

So.

Well, he did a very, very, very well crafted campaign with messages directed.

Actually maybe it was one of the best campaigns that you can see oriented towards Latinos in recent US history.

He had the messages for the Latino community at that point.

So I think that his Texas origins gave him some understanding of the Latino community that other candidates do not have.

So let's give that to Bush.

So he did well with this population in Terms of message, he did.

Although to your point, I mean, that was one of the reasons that Jeb was considered the heir apparent in 2016 and Trump made quick work of him.

Like Jeb's ties in Florida and with the Spanish speaking wife, like none of that counted because Trump like basically insulted him off the stage.

Yes.

So now the question is, did Tram do the same good, well crafted strategy messaging to Latino communities?

I think yes, but in a different way.

So first and foremost, when I talk to both the people from the the GOP office in Wisconsin and the people on the streets who voted for Trump, Latinos, they told me this about religion, this about family and this about economic opportunities.

So it really worked.

These three policy issues and you can add migration, which is linked to crime in the rhetoric of Trump.

So you have these four.

First, religion and religion and family are linked because I think that what the Democratic Party was underscoring, which is abortion rights.

I was in Kamala's rallies in Eau Claire and Madison during this campaign and abortion had a very important place in these speeches.

And I think that there is a huge population that saw that this should not be the center of the conversation.

And they link it with religion and they link it with family.

I can tell you that two of my interviewees, they voted for Obama in 2008, 2012, and then they voted for Trump twice.

One of them told me, because I thought that Obama was going to commit with his Christian values, but he didn't.

Don't ask me why.

He connected that in 2008 Obama was very, he had the Christian values, but not necessarily that he was Christian.

Right.

But I think it eventually disappointed them as well.

So I think that there was a lot of disappointment on Obama becoming the mainstream, which lead part of the country to go to someone who looks even more anti establishment than Obama, Trump 2016.

And now we went back to the establishment and we need something anti establishment again because it is not working, working.

So okay, let's go back to the policy issue.

So you have abortion didn't work.

There was a lot of backlash and it's related to religion and family.

Then you have economic opportunities that it is clear that the economic policies from the Democratic Party and Kamala were different to grasp.

It was difficult to understand what was the proposal about.

And with Trump, many of them had the memory that economy went well, 2017, 2018, 2019.

So this is not rocket science.

And then you have border and crime.

And this comes back to the discussion at the beginning.

So who are supporting that?

Actually migrants are Criminals.

And we have to get rid of them.

Those who are detached with the migration story of their families, who are they?

Young people, mostly young men.

Make sense.

I'm trying to make it simpler.

It's like it is not science.

It makes sense.

But do you think that the same dynamic was happening in 2004?

I guess is my question, because Bush pulled something like this off in 2004.

But my impression is that that was probably something different.

But I'm trying to line up whether Trump basically just did.

Did what Bush did, but did it better, or whether something has fundamentally changed in the last 20 years.

Yes, there is something that has fundamentally changed, is that.

And that connects again to what is happening in Latin America.

So first, in 2004, there was no a migration crisis in Latin America as we have today.

So the idea that migration is a risk, that migration is bringing bad things to the country is not something that it's exclusive to the US Right now as a narrative.

It is a narrative that you can share all across the Americas right now, if you go to Mexico, if you go to Argentina, if you go to Chile, if you go to Peru, you go to Colombia.

Everywhere migration is a problem.

I'm not saying migrants are a problem.

I am saying migration is a problem from my perspective.

But people eventually make the case that migrants are the problem.

And migrants come all across Americas in this narrative with crime.

So this is not only a narrative about.

About the U.S.

from the U.S.

in the U.S.

it's a narrative all across Americas, migrants and crime together.

So this is different.

Second, what is different is that in 2004, while in Latin America there was a rise of the left, Bush was winning elections here.

Now you have a rise of the conservative movement all across Americas with maybe not winning all the elections, but very important elections.

So you have Milei, you have Voltanaro, who won, then lost, but he's still there as an important figure you have cast in Chile, who likely will win soon.

Right.

So what we are witnessing is that there is very strong conservative, even libertarian narratives all across the Americas, that even if they don't win all the elections, they are very relevant and salient in people's minds.

Yeah, the exception there.

Well, maybe not the exception.

Maybe you'll tell me if it's an exception.

I mean, you brought up the difference between men and women and abortion.

And we can talk.

I mean, Milei and Argentina have a lot to do with that conversation too.

But I'm also struck by, you know, it was.

Mexico has elected a female president before the United States Claudia Sheinbaum is going to is the president of Mexico right now.

And Mexicans are by far the largest Hispanic group inside of the United States.

And yet in Mexico, Shanebaum, I guess is the one who has the machismo.

Or does she?

I don't know.

That seems like an outlier here.

Although, you know, the.

I have an answer for that.

Good.

It comes again with a generation.

So migrants.

I talked to a woman who is a migrant, naturalized from Mexico and she told me this.

I think we need in the US a woman president as we have in Mexico.

But if you ask the same question to a second generation, third generation woman, it is not necessarily in their top of mind.

And you know, what is the, this is the precise figure that I wanted to share a few days ago with you.

It was like, you know, what is the most common age of the Latino population in the US the most common age.

I know the median age is like somewhere around 26 or 27, but I don't know what the average age is.

What is it the most common age?

The mold is 11.

Yeah, that's crazy.

Right?

It was 11, 11 years old two years ago.

So it should be maybe 13 years old right now, but it's still so very young population.

So what you have is that you have a huge population of young Latinos voting here.

I will give you an example.

Part of my research, ethnographic project included canvassing for the Democrats in the, in the Latino neighbors in Milwaukee.

And I was knocking the door and a very kind Mexican woman opened the door and I told him, who are you going to vote for?

You know, and she told me, well, I don't vote, but I have in the system that someone is voting in your house.

And she told me, yes, maybe my daughter.

I didn't know that she can vote.

Oh well, can I talk to her obviously with you also?

And he said, well, no, right now she's not at home, but I can tell you that she's in high school right now.

So.

So first, weird ideas here.

A lot of ideas here.

First, someone in the household could vote, but parents did not know.

She's a very young woman.

I think she was 18 years old.

Second they said, well, we don't know if she's going to vote.

We didn't have this conversation.

Fair.

Right.

So there are many young people who can vote and are not socializing it with their families.

Right.

In the say, like, hey, let's have this conversation.

It is not happening.

So and this is very important.

I like the 2004 and it comes to my field right now, which is we now have social media.

In 2004, social media was not there.

I think that Facebook existed, but was not mainstream yet.

So it was the beginnings of social media.

And do you, do you think what was in that moment when you were at home and this little girl, I think 18 years old, was at home, what was on, on TV?

What, Univision or Telemundo?

Univision or Telemundo?

Because parents speak Spanish and Univision.

And what do you think is the leaning of these two outlets?

You've got me.

This is outside of my wheelhouse.

It is not Republican, it is not Democrat, it's Latino.

So actually they lean Latino and they will favor and they will inform policies that are good for Latinos, whether they are Republicans or they are Democrats.

So 20 years ago you had a media ecosystem that actually created more consistently this idea of Latinos and you didn't have social media.

Now I was talking to a mother from Eau Claire who has a 15 years old daughter and she was telling me it is very difficult for me to change her mind because she is leaning track because she's socializing, whether in social media or with her different friends, that they are voting for Trump.

So we have a different media ecosystem.

When young people are getting information from more sources than only your family, media or school, they are having information about politics from TikTok, from Snapchat, from Instagram, from YouTube and so on.

You have more sources of information and it's more likely to nudge them if you know how to target them.

Does that make sense?

It does.

Which sort of.

Because I'm struck by what you said earlier about the longer that, and my family can speak to this too, that the longer an immigrant is in the country, the more disconnected you are from your roots.

My family is maybe weird in the sense though that we're actually still deeply connected to our roots.

I've never forgotten that my father was first generation and I'm still connected to all his family outside the United States.

And like, I don't know.

But yes, it would make sense.

Then if you're cutting off that, that media ecosystem environment, it must be even easier to forget your connection to those roots, which is sort of what social media does in general, I guess.

And you can view that as a positive.

You could view that as like a great horizontal leveling thing that gives everybody the same sort of experience, except that social media also allows you to hive off and self select into the things that you agree with rather than sort of giving you Any kind.

I know I'm rambling a little bit.

There, but no, that's a perfect question.

And I would say first, it depends a lot on how your family see your traditions, your connections and the relevance of it.

For many Latino people, coming here was a very good way of cutting every single connection with the country that you are living, because that country is very problematic.

I'm not saying it's general, but many of them was like, we're going to start a new life here.

I will tell you two very strong comments that I've heard.

I was listening for my research project.

I was listening a lot of Ambradia and I, I was hearing this woman from.

She, she was calling to this radio station and she was, she said, I am from Los Angeles, I am a legal in.

I, I was born in the US but my husband is it, he doesn't have papers, he's undocumented.

That's what she said.

And she said, my husband told me that I need to vote for Trump and that he knows that he can be deported, but our sons will stay here in a better country.

So what she said is like, my husband is accepting the trade off that he could be deported, but his children will have a better future.

That is crazy.

But that says a lot that how you see this country is like, for many people, this country is like, hey, this country is a new beginning.

Let's start again.

Yeah.

Which is a special part of Trump's charisma.

And I think a lot of people, myself included, have always had trouble thinking of Trump as charismatic because he comes off differently depending on what your background is.

To me, he comes off as relatively coarse and unsophisticated.

I knew tons of real estate salesmen in New York.

Trump is not new to me and that sort of attitude is not new to me.

But to people who haven't experienced him before, he can be very charismatic.

And the reason I think he's charismatic is you've actually just hit on it.

There's a two part step to it.

Number one, he projects supreme confidence at all times.

It doesn't matter whether he knows something or not.

He's got an answer for it, he's going to stick to it.

He has no foibles about what's true or not.

Like, he's just going to say the thing.

And people who have fear or internal self doubt, I mean, will look to people with confidence and say, oh, okay, that person is really confident that I'm going to follow there.

The second thing that Trump has always had is this Sort of blindingly passionate commitment to the idea that America is going to be great again under him and that America is fundamentally great and has always been fundamentally great, and fuck anybody who didn't think it was fundamentally great.

And he's going to fix the whole thing.

Which is to say, despite the fact that people like me find him uncharismatic, he has a chokehold on the future.

You know, Kamala Harris was trying to do it with vibes and Brat and all these other things, but Trump was the one who actually, like, got the electorate and the chokehold and said, I am the change candidate.

I am the positive candidate.

I am the one who has the future in mind.

I will make the country better for you.

You.

And the reason I say it's charismatic is because when you look at the policies he's offering, they may be easier to understand.

But I would argue that the policies that he's talking about may actually, especially in the short term, cause economic pain, especially for the lower levels of society.

But despite the policy matrix that he's talking about, his messaging has always been, I'm going to make America great.

I know how to make America great.

These other people don't know how to make America great.

And I think that that at least accounts for some of what you're talking about.

If that guy is willing to, I'll be deported so that my children can have a better future.

That means he believes, okay, Trump, he believes Trump.

He believes that Trump believes America is great and will make it great.

That's a very, very powerful emotion to have control of.

Do you remember our conversation about Milei a few months ago?

I.

Do you remember?

The, the puzzle then was also the same.

How people could possibly vote for this guy who is going.

Who is promising a better life, but after a lot of pain.

Well, the, the difference, though, with Milei, and there are some similarities, but the difference with Milei was that Argentina was actually going down the.

The toilet bowl.

You had hyperinflation, you'd had decades of underperformance, you'd had corruption, you'd have, like, things had gotten very, very bad for the normal Argentine person in the US Economy.

The US Economy is running too hot.

Like, people are actually doing pretty well.

They don't feel like they're doing well.

And the purchasing power of the middle class has declined significantly in the last 20 or 30 years.

But compared to how Argentines are going with.

You wouldn't think that, you know, Americans have such an economic crisis that they are looking for someone to save them with this this is how, this is one of the interesting things about Trump's charisma.

Even though he was, he was arguably part of the thing that created inflation, he somehow got it, got to blame everything on Biden with inflation and took none of the flack for his role in it in 2016-2020, when he was cutting tax rates, when he was bullying the Fed into keeping interest rates low, even as we were getting to the end of a bull cycle.

So who cares about the averages of the economy if you are living in the streets of Brooklyn, in the rural area of Wisconsin?

So who cares about the average?

They do feel, they perceive that they cannot afford what they could before.

They can feel, and this is true, Jacob, that people cannot buy a house that they could 20 years before.

So this, even if the average inflation, GDP and all the economic, the unemployment, all these economic statistics that we are using to assess economy on average are okay, you can feel, and I felt within the conversation with the people that they are feeling that this country is worse than before.

You can blame whoever wants, but they are feeling that this country is worse than before.

Yeah, I was looking up some data while you were talking because you said the sort of average age around 11 or the mode was 11 or 12 around there.

And we'll put this on the YouTube channel for those of you who are watching on YouTube.

If you look at a population pyramid for the Hispanic population in the United States sort of over the last 20 to 30 years, it's really interesting in 2010, it looks like the platonic ideal of a population pyramid under five is the biggest, and it goes sort of up from there in that triangular shape.

What's interesting for 2020 is that you're exactly.

It supports what you're saying because the biggest bulge is in that group, 10 to 14.

But then there's a sharp contraction for ages 5 to 9 and an even sharper contraction for ages under 5, which may actually point to have we reached the high water mark of the Hispanic population growing?

Because it seems like the biggest growth period was actually 10 years ago.

And over the last 10 years, the population growth figure is actually slowing for the Hispanics more than the rest of the population.

There was another really interesting statistic here and though that I want to throw at you and maybe this will get us into talking about the Americas more generally, which is in 2010.

So the majority of the Hispanic population in the south reported their race as white alone, 62.9% 10 years later.

So by 2020, only 23.2% reported as white alone in the South.

And in 2020, the Hispanic population that reported two or more races, so multiracial population, they were reporting at 37.9% among the South.

The south is also obviously where most.

That's the bastion of conservatism, the bastion of American, even evangelicalism, even evangelism.

Evangelism is the word I'm looking for.

Evangelism a much.

If you don't know, I don't know.

Oh, I got there.

I embarrassed myself getting there, but that's what I do.

I like to embarrass myself and then I stumble upon the truth.

But sort of interesting in the sense, if you think of the Hispanic population in the south basically marrying with the poor whites and creating these multiracial families and creating this new tapestry of what it means to be Southerner or what it means to be Hispanic or multiracial in that.

In that context.

And I have not really seriously interrogated this idea.

It might be completely full of nonsense, but I was struck by the historical inversion here.

Because if you go back to the American Civil War and you go back to slavery in the south, the Confederacy, if they had won the Civil War, if they had won independence for themselves, they were looking to Latin America with big eyes because they thought they were basically going to replicate the slavery model throughout all of Latin America.

And some of the Confederates who ended up fleeing the Confederacy after they lost the war set up shop in towns in Brazil, and there are still like weird towns in Brazil where they're basically practicing slavery, or where they were practicing slavery not that long ago with these Confederate ideals.

And the reason I say it's an inversion, because you have the south in the United States is this conservative landowning class that wants to use slave labor to create these products to almost like Latin America's hodgepodge of multiracialism and things like that actually now becoming part of what the south is.

And in some ways, the south now resembling Latin America rather than maybe resembling some parts of the Northeast or other parts even of the West.

So I don't know.

That might be a crazy idea, but it's a really fascinating statistic that Hispanics themselves are identifying in the south as more Hispanic or as even multiracial.

I don't have the statistics.

I think that you already shared it in a very illustrative way because it shows, again, the diversity of the Latino population.

So there is this tension, and this tension is very present in this conversation.

First, Latino, Hispanic in particular, is a label that comes top down.

It is not bottom Up.

So it's the government of the United States who decided to create this label Hispanic for a big bunch of the population in the United states in the 60s, 70s, I don't know.

And now we are keeping this conversation about Latinos, Hispanic as one single group, because the government told us that this group exists.

That being said, when I am Peruvian, when I come to the U.S.

it is unavoidable for me to take the Latino identity as mine, too.

I am not.

I don't have the Latino.

I'm not saying every time when I'm in Peru, hey, hello, I'm Latin American, I am Latino.

No, I'm Peruvian.

And my difference is kind of, I'm from the Amazon region.

I'm from the.

I'm from.

I'm an Amazonian boy in Peru.

When I come here, this Latino label becomes salient, and my connection with the Latino community becomes salient, too, because of the language, because of the traditions, because of the connations, because we dance better than Jews, I'm pretty sure.

So it becomes salient.

And because evidently we have similar political concerns sometimes or differences that we understand.

But at the same time, we have to underscore that Latino is not, as I explained at the beginning, one single social or political status of things.

It is very diverse because the country you come from, because where you look, the community you are living in, because your migration story, and even, as you said, because there's this status, very subtle status differences that come from Latin America.

Like, I am in Latin America a white man, immediately I touch the US And I become a man of color, right?

But in this space that you are now telling us about in the south, maybe these nuances are becoming more salient, too.

It's like, well, in Latin America, I was a white man.

I want to be a white man.

In the US Maybe people are thinking, so we don't know.

And this is a lot about.

Also what is happening, and this is not only about Latino community, is that there is narrative of using your power to succeed.

And I will tell you, one story of my interviewees is like, one of them told me, he didn't say this, but he had this conversation that he asked, why are you voting for Trump?

To another Latino?

And this Latino told him, who is your boss voting for?

So this aspirational idea of those who have money, those who are doing good in the US Are voting for Trump.

And this narrative is connecting with a lot of these Latino people because they came to this country to make money and have a better life for their families.

Yeah.

What can I say?

So I'm connecting to you, what you said.

Do they want to be white?

Maybe.

Maybe if you look at their face, they are not, but I feel like they are.

Yeah.

Well, how do you apply this on to the rest of Latin America?

Because I know that you want to apply this beyond just sort of the United States context.

So how do we map this on to what's happening in Peru or in Chile or in Argentina?

Because I think one of the provocative things that you've said to me is that rather than the United States maybe impacting the politics of the rest of Latin America, it almost seems like the politics of Latin America has started to impact the politics of the United States.

So I'll let you take that in whatever direction you want.

Yes.

First, what I have found is that.

That.

Political narratives from Latin America connect and sometimes inform Latino politics.

Latin American politics could inform Latino politics.

First, and very important, and I told you this at some moment in one of our conversations.

So people are tracking.

Latino people in the US Are tracking in different ways what is happening in Venezuela.

Because there is this fear that the US could become Venezuela.

This is a narrative that you can see in every single election in Latin America, Jake, the right.

Telling the people, we will become Latin America.

If you vote for these communists and this communist is maybe the more moderate leftist that you can find, but he is a communist that will destroy the country.

Come on.

This is a narrative that was very present here, but with the Latino community, you could connect it with Venezuela more than in other communities.

I don't know how it happening in other communities.

Maybe Asia have their Venezuela.

Asians have.

Have their Venezuela in the narrative.

I mean, I don't know.

So, first, second, I told you a moment ago, there is this narrative about migration and crime that is crossing all across the Americas because unlike the 2004 Bush, we have this migration crisis that everything takes us to Venezuela again.

Right.

This migration crisis mainly in Venezuela, but not only very.

A lot of people for Central America are traveling into the US and while traveling to the US they're crossing Mexico.

And while crossing Mexico, they have clashes and tensions with Mexicans too.

And this could.

And it replicates here.

I have heard in my conversation a lot of tensions between Central Americans, people from Honoras, people from Guatemala, that are not in the best terms with the Mexican population here.

Yeah.

So these tensions are present.

And this comes back again with the idea of this Latino are not one single crystallized group.

Coesit group.

So migration and crime, because migration is connected to more crime.

In the narrative and trend, Aragua is now a problem also in Colorado.

It's not only a problem in Peru or Chile.

We have talked about the trend many times when we were talking about Latin America.

And now suddenly it's becoming a problem also in Colorado State.

Right.

So you have that there.

And then.

Come on, Jacob, who were two of the people who visited Trump in Mar a Lago?

In Mar a Lago, Milei and Bolsonaro in the last few years.

So actually you have.

I always remember, I always forget the name of this guy.

Carlson.

Tucker is the name of this Tucker Carlson.

Yeah, Tucker Carlson.

I was confused that.

So Tucker Carlson interviewed Milei.

He did a few months ago.

So unlike 20 years ago, there is a set of narratives that are traveling all across.

And finally, this backlash against abortion, against LGBT groups, about gender narrative, what we call woke in the US and in Peru we call caviar.

It's this idea of this attack against liberal and progressive ideas is common all across the the region.

And you find connections, and you find that people who support Bolsonaro in Brazil are happy because Trump won.

And people who support Trump here will be happy if Bolsonaro wins in the future.

So there is this connection that we cannot avoid.

And I frame it in this way.

It's about the US but it is not only about the US it is about Trump, but it is not only about Trump, but Trump will become the leader of this movement in the Americas and not only in the Americas in the next following years.

Now it comes to the next conversation, which is how can Democrats leave Donald Trump?

The achievement of picking the first secretary of state with Latino roots in the US History, Jacob.

So we have to accept that he did it.

The first Latino Secretary of the state in the United States in history was picked by Donald Trump.

And he's a guy who understands.

We cannot agree with his viewpoints, but he understands what's happened in Latin America more than maybe any other Secretary of state before now, how he's going to deal with migration, crime.

Because migration and crime have this tricky discussion.

We Latin Americans, in relation to the US we do not want that the relation with the US Becomes only about crime and migration.

But we cannot avoid talking about crime and migration.

So we have this tension.

We don't want them to be the core issues, but they are the core issues.

That is attention.

How are we going to deal with attention?

That's important.

Next, what the hell is happening with Panama?

What the hell is how this could lead to different relationship and tensions with Latin America?

That is Something that I am still trying to figure out.

What do you think?

Yeah, I mean, I actually so, I mean, I did a.

We're recording here on Thursday.

This is going to come out in a couple days.

I also recorded with Rob earlier this morning and I talked about Panama being the one crazy thing that Trump has said this last week that I was like, I really need to sit with that because of all like the other ones are pretty out there.

But like that one is actually not that crazy if you actually sit and think about it and things about.

Think about U.S.

history and U.S.

capacity.

But before we get there, I wanted to ask you because you did a good job of sketching everything that's happening in Latin America from a political point of view.

But it seems to me the outlier we've mentioned them already, but I think we have to take them head on is Mexico.

Brazil, you can say, is still right and conservative because the Brazilian Congress, you know, even though Lula won, like it's not Lula as it was in the early 2000s, this is.

He's been hamstrung to a large extent by a congress that has been very supportive of Bolsonaro and of the right.

But that's not true in Mexico.

So Shane Baum has a super majority.

AMLO has gone after some of these folks and is friendlier with Venezuela.

I mean, so talk about.

Because Mexico seems to be standing there as an outlier now.

AMLO himself is also sort of libertarian and he has also some of these weird quotes, quirks to him that are more in line with what we're talking about.

But let me know what you're seeing there.

Mexico has its own history of politics that is very unique in comparison to Latin America.

So we can go back to Pre and how Pre was in government for like 60 years.

Octavio Pass used this Nobel Prize winner of Churchill in Mexico.

He said once, like PRI was a contradiction itself.

It's like it is revolutionary and institutional at the same time.

It's like a party of revolution and it's a revolutional and institutional party.

It's like how could you be revolutionary and institutional at the same time?

So it's a contradiction itself, but that's something that actually lead this body to offering always change within the same.

Why I'm bringing Pre to the conversation because there are some specialists in Mexico, I am not one who say that actually Morena, the party from Ano and Cherry Cuban is becoming a new Pre Right is becoming the new ruling party in the country and it could last for a few More years.

And again, this, maybe it is not in the name, but you also have this idea of revolutionary institutions or institutions revolutionary or like the contradiction of institutions, which is something that could stick and stay in that way, and revolution, which means change.

What you have in common is that amlo, I'm not talking about Claude schema, but amlo was at this, at the end, very close to Trump in terms of the charismatic figure and the establishment figure.

Right.

So we have to grant that.

So we have to accept Jacob.

But this is very important for this conversation about the America.

So what is happening in the US Is business as usual for Latin America.

Picking the anti establishment, electing the populist, electing the strongman.

So, come on, this is business as usual for us, but it was not for you.

So that is why we were discussing.

So welcome to the United States of Latin America.

Because what the challenges that the US Is facing, not all of them, you have more money, you have military power, you were ruling the world for many years.

So we cannot compare any Latin American country with this country in that way.

What we can do in terms of comparison is the style that Donald Trump is bringing into US politics is very similar of the style that we have seen in Latin America before.

A trauma, anti establishment and populism.

And actually what I feel is that Trumpism will become something so relevant as Peronism, as Uribism, as Fujimorism in Latin America, something that will transcend these years.

Yeah, I mean, the title of this podcast is going to be welcome to the United States of Latin America, but you just gave me what would have been also a great title, which is the Rise of Trumpismo, which is probably what we're talking about.

Trumpismo, yes, Trumpismo, exactly.

That is what we're talking about.

So Trumpismo, we have to connect it.

And you know, what is my fear, in addition to all the fears that we could discuss, is that he will thrive in many ways while he will do a lot of harm with the other hand.

And that is very common in our countries.

If you talk about Fujimorism, if you're talking about Fujimorismo, Uribismo, Peronismo, you have all these core discussions in society about what they did well, like in Peru, ending terrorism and defeating Senro Luminoso, like in Argentina, going with the poor directly for the very first time.

And you will have this ambivalence of doing great in some aspects and doing the worst possible thing that you could do in other aspects.

And I can tell you some prediction that I have about the Latino community and Trump in the U.S.

i think that he will be forced if he wants to deport many people.

He wouldn't be forced.

Forced to legalize, to make legal many people, many Latino people in the US before or while deporting, because you cannot deport so millions.

Or you will have people who voted for you and who were having here 10 years, 20 years, and you will have maybe this paradox that maybe Donald Trump will deport more people than ever.

Maybe.

But at the same time, he will give permissions to work, recite, or naturalize more people than ever at the same time.

So it will be great for few and horrible for most.

But this will create this classic tension about Trumpismo and how he will be remembered in the following years.

Well, this is the huge constraint on him and which makes him different than some of the other authoritarian strongmen because he is still accountable to the electorate.

And this actually goes back to what I said at the very or what I said close at the beginning about him having a chokehold hold on making America great and on optimism.

The thing is, he was elected because he was seen as better for the economy than Harris.

And he was elected talking about how inflation was bad and talking to poor people and making them feel like he was going to be the champion.

The problem with that is if you institute tariffs and if you deport millions and if you do all the things that he's talking about, you are going to increase inflation and you're going to make the economy worse.

And if he starts doing that and he starts seeing the inflation figures uptick, that constraint should still work on him.

So when he says things like I'm going to deport millions of people, I would call bullshit.

Because I would say you're not going to do that.

Because the moment you start doing that, the labor market's going to get super tight and inflation, labor inflation is going to go through the roof.

And if you do that on top of applying tariffs on Mexico and on Canada and on all these other countries, now we're going to get like inflation on that side of the equation and you'll be like, you'll lose your majorities in the Senate and the House within two years and you will be kicked to the curb in four years.

So there is that.

There's still that economic constraint mechanism working for him and how he, how he's going to do that and how like Trumpismo, in order to survive, in some sense, he has to at least convince people that he has been good for the economy and the most dangerous thing I think for him is that if he follows through with some of the policies he's talking about, he's actually going to completely get rid of that argument.

But maybe I'm wrong.

I do think there's also an argument to what you're saying about where he has all this power and he could do things.

And maybe he is the one that is going to slash through some of the problems.

Maybe he will slash through federal bureaucracy and he'll get the federal government working better again.

Maybe he'll be the U.S.

president.

We've been trying to get immigration law reform in this country since the 1980s.

A majority of Americans have said since.

Maybe he will do it.

Maybe he's the one.

Maybe he's going to do the Nixon in China moment and he's going to actually restore relations between Beijing and Washington for other purposes.

But he will do it.

Right.

But that's the.

Again, well, just, just one thing.

That's the amazing thing about him.

Even his critics or even the analysts who are trying to, you know, objectively but critically look at his policies, have to say, but, you know, he could be great.

Like, maybe he could do all the things that he's talking about.

He has this interesting dynamic to him.

Sorry, go ahead.

So in 2024, the number of people deported from the US to their countries was the highest after 2012.

So two messages about this.

So the highest before was Obama and now the highest is Biden.

But evidently Biden does not celebrate that.

Actually, you can, you're Googling.

You can look at those figures now, but Biden is not celebrating that.

Biden actually is not saying that what Trump has to do in the very first year is to do better than Biden.

Just it doesn't have to be the million people.

It has to be like I am doing the largest number of deportations in the last 20 years and that it's okay.

He's accomplishing part of what he's promising, not the millions, but he can make an achievement from this, which Biden is not doing.

But at the same time, you can say right now that Biden was actually during Biden administration, you can see the largest deportation numbers in the last 15 years.

What Donald Trump has to do, only to have an achievement in the very first year is to do business as usual to continue what Biden was doing with a little more push.

And now they have the resources because they have learned at the same time, and I have seen that from the Latino community, there will be a lot of resistance.

And that is something that I was telling also a lot of people, it's like unlike 2016, you have that civil society and institutions and actually state governments or local governments too are preparing for trust.

So you will see more institutional confrontations that will test not only check and balances in terms of horizontal accountability, but also in terms of vertical accountability.

So how the federal and local governments challenge the federal government, the state and local governments challenge the federal government, we will see more that because I have seen in the Latino community, they are preparing for that in terms of deportations.

I have seen meetings with churches, schools right now, preparing with protocols and emergency responses for what could happen if ICE come to Madison or to any, any city in Wisconsin suddenly and how to react because children actually, if you have a, this kind of deportation process, you can find that in a single afternoon people go out to school and they don't see their parents at home.

So what's going to happen at the moment?

So there is a lot of resistance and I celebrate that I have seen the Latino actually.

The other paradox is that maybe Trump will bring the Latino community together again if he starts to achieve what he's promising.

So what I feel after your, your doubts about the, what he can do with economy is that I feel that many things could happen that are out of our vision right now because I don't know, like Panama and please, before we end, because I know that you have to leave at 11.

We were talking about the Americas.

What is happening with Canada that is out of my scope.

Why Canada is in a conversation and why is it with a US Flag right now in Trump's social media?

Yeah, I mean it doesn't.

Well here I'll try to take it from his point of view, which is Trump has talked about being America first and so he doesn't like probably how intertwined Canadian and American supply chains are.

And he probably thinks it's a quick win to try and consolidate some of that cross border economy within the United States itself.

I think a lot of this is also personality driven though.

He didn't like Trudeau.

Trudeau didn't like him.

Trudeau was, you know, for a while I think considered himself, you know, one of the leaders of wokeism and war as a badge of honor and viewed himself as, you know, the exact opposite of Trump in those ways.

He's gone now.

Like he's, he's.

And I think if you get a conservative Canadian ruler, maybe things will revert differently.

But that I think is at least part of it.

There's also this, this actually Goes back to something I said last week on the podcast with Rob too, which is Trump's views almost seem like they would have been normal 100 years ago.

Like if you go back to the United states in the 1920s, 1930s, Canada was considered one of its gravest foreign policy threats because the British might use it to do things to the United States, either militarily or economically.

It wasn't until World War II that the United States and Great Britain have this great relationship.

And all of those fears from the 17, 18 and early 1900s get put to bed.

So, you know, Trump comes by his suspicion of Canada and his desire to integrate it economically and to take those jobs back and everything else.

I mean, there is some precedent for that in US Foreign policy.

But coming out and saying things like, we will make Canada the 51st state, I mean, that's the Trumpismo that we're talking about.

Like he has this idea that he wants, you know, low hanging fruit from the Canadian economy and he's going to bully them into it.

But it also goes back to what I'm saying, between what he says and what he's going to do if he uses US Emergency laws to enact tariffs against Canada.

I mean, aren't you just, you're basically killing the U.S.

mexico, Canada, free Trade Agreement, because at that point Canada can say, okay, well, you're breaking the rules and maybe it goes to arbitration.

I don't know what happens then.

We'll need an international lawyer to figure it out.

But that starts to unravel this engine.

What has been the engine of North American economic integration since NAFTA in the early 1990s, for better or for worse.

So you can hear the ambivalence, of course.

Can I give you a different thesis?

Sure.

I think that Trump is helping the conservative candidate in Canada because he is giving the conservative candidate resources tools, narrative resources, narrative tools to say that he's the only one who can give this backlash, this confrontation, who can really stand up in front of Trump because W kissing will never do it.

He may.

And maybe he's playing that third dimensional chess, we'll know fairly early on.

Because if he comes in and tries to slap twice 20, 25% tariffs on everything coming in from Canada, like that's going to be really bad.

He's just going to harden opposition against him in Canada, I would think.

And he's also going to do a lot of damage for especially states in the United States that have relationships with Canada, whether it's your, Michigan's or Minnesotas.

North Dakotas, like all those states deeply intertwined with the Canadian economy.

If you mess that up like, you're messing up the state economies for a lot of different states.

But, yes, he could be doing it that way as well.

I take your thesis.

I don't think the tariffs are going to happen in the way he.

I think that he's.

It's a.

It's a negotiation piece in the chess.

I don't think it is like something that it will happen.

I think that he's trying to sit down again on a table with Mexico and Canada to reshape everything and Tyrus as they are.

The excuse.

I think so.

But the reason that the U.S.

mexico, Canada free Trade Agreement renegotiations didn't go the way that he thought they would during his administration was because he was at the top yelling about tariffs and everything else.

And meanwhile, he didn't fill the lower levels of bureaucracy that you need to win at trade negotiations.

So that's why Canada and Mexico really won the trade negotiations the first time around.

So maybe he's got buyer's remorse and he wants to do all of this going into the 2026 renegotiation, and he'll put together the team that he didn't put together in the first.

First term, and he'll be able to put things that way.

That.

That certainly might be the case.

But to do what you're talking about, he can't just say these things and then not have people around him that can actually do things on a bureaucratic level.

And his biggest weakness as a leader has been that he doesn't empower people below him to go and do things.

It's that he undercuts them.

It's that he puts people against each other.

It's almost like he's doing the Apprentice, except it's the White House version of it.

And he wants to take.

You are fired.

You didn't have like a.

Not even a learning curve.

Right?

Exactly.

So we'll leave it there.

Elo.

We'll have you back soon, obviously.

And.

Yeah, that's all I.

I think we have covered almost all the issues.

Sounds good.