Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s 2016 presidential campaign hung Spanish-language signs up high in his new Miami office, as Bush himself attended the office opening to try to jumpstart his lagging campaign.
The Spanish language signs hung behind Bush as he spoke, reading “#TodosPorJeb!”
“This is the day to open up our campaign headquarters so that I can become the next president of the United States,” Bush said during the campaign event.
This all comes as Bush is using the Spanish language to attack Trump yet again, with the latest being Bush calling Trump a “pobrecito” — which roughly translates to “poor man” — in Miami this weekend, all while Bush dives further in polling dropping into low single digits in early primary state polling.
Bush spokesman Tim Miller confirmed to Breitbart News that the campaign signs made in a foreign language, Spanish, are indeed official Bush campaign signs. Miller defended the foreign language signs by arguing that “every campaign produces Spanish language material,” pointing to a website in Spanish from Bush rival Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX).
“There are many bilingual American voters, particularly in Miami,” Miller said. “And many bilingual Republican primary voters in Miami who have seen the damage the left has wrought to Latin American countries.”
Bush’s use of foreign languages in America on the presidential campaign trail has landed him in serious trouble in recent weeks, particularly when he attacked GOP frontrunner billionaire Donald Trump in Spanish at a press conference a couple weeks ago.
“El hombre no es conservador,” Bush said in Spanish of Trump while speaking to press at the La Progresiva school in Miami, which teaches kids both English and Spanish. Bush’s comments translate to: “The man is not conservative.”
Bush was responding to Willie Horton-esque type ad from Trump’s team, published on Instagram, that compared Bush’s previous comments praising illegal immigration as an “act of love” with images of convicted criminal illegal aliens, including murderers. Had the United States enforced its immigration laws, the illegal aliens’ American victims would still be alive.
In the press conference, Bush accused Trump of daily saying things about him that were “not true” — something Miller and Bush campaign manager Danny Diaz were unable to find a single example of since the beginning of the campaign given a chance later.
In response to Bush’s Spanish language attack, Trump, in an exclusive interview with Breitbart News, called on Bush to stop the nonsense and start leading on the campaign trail by speaking English.
“I like Jeb,” Trump said. “He’s a nice man. But he should really set the example by speaking English while in the United States.”
Technically, U.S. immigration law requires immigrants who are naturalized as U.S. citizens to prove proficiency in English before getting citizenship. Since illegal aliens aren’t permitted to vote, that means there is but a minuscule percentage of the voting population in America that can’t, under U.S. law, speak English. The only people who that situation — being able to speak Spanish but not English, while also being a U.S. citizen — would apply to would be people born in America with U.S. citizenship who never learned English. Even most anchor babies, people born here with U.S. citizenship to mothers who came to the U.S. illegally to give birth to their children here, do learn English, so the amount of people who can vote for Bush and speaks Spanish but not English is almost nobody.
As such, Bush’s team continues claiming he is speaking to people who are bilingual, or speak both English and Spanish, but won’t answer why he doesn’t just talk to them in English, a language that all of them speak rather than dividing Americans by speaking to some in English and others in a foreign tongue.
Miller previously directed Breitbart News to old 2001 data from Gallup that determined of about 23 percent “English speaking conservatives in America also speak a 2nd language, predominately Spanish,” and argued that is to whom Bush is speaking in Spanish.
Bush attacked Trump in the foreign language yet again on Saturday in Miami, according to the Associated Press. “Mr. Trump says that I can’t speak Spanish,” Bush said, before lambasting Trump as a “pobrecito,” which means “poor guy.”
Bush also used the press conference at his new Miami office this weekend to rewrite the history of the 1980 presidential election, comparing himself to the general election GOP ticket that boasted Ronald Reagan at the top and Bush’s father, future president George H.W. Bush, as vice president. Bush ripped open his buttoned dress shirt to reveal a tee-shirt from the Reagan-Bush campaign, comparing himself to that ticket.
“That’s the party I believe in: Reagan and Bush,” Bush said.
What Bush didn’t tell the Miami audience was that Reagan agreed to have his father as the vice president only after what was perhaps one of the most brutal GOP primaries in history, where Reagan slogged through, finally beating Bush late in the game. He let the establishment non-conservative Bush on the ticket in an effort to unify the GOP against incumbent Democratic president Jimmy Carter. Later, Bush’s father lost re-election as president in 1992’s presidential election to Democrat Bill Clinton — whose wife Hillary, ironically, is currently the Democratic presidential frontrunner in 2016 — after violating a pledge not to raise taxes. George H.W. Bush only won the White House after benefitting from eight years of Reagan’s leadership.
Bush continues slipping further and further in recent polls, losing support as the election cycle progresses. Polls last Sunday from NBC News/Marist in New Hampshire and Iowa showed Bush way down in single digits. In Iowa, he was at six percent, and in must-win-for-Bush New Hampshire, he was at just eight percent. A new poll from YouGov/CBS News on Sunday this weekend shows he’s slipped even further in both Iowa and New Hampshire with a virtually non-existent polling position in South Carolina, too. In the Hawkeye State in the new poll, Bush is at three percent while polling only at six percent in the Granite State. In South Carolina, Bush registers at just fove percent.
Bush’s use of a foreign language is well outside the mainstream of where most Americans, not just Republicans but all Americans, are on the issue. ProEnglish, an organization that supports English as America’s official language, compiled polling data on the issue on its website that shows overwhelming majorities of Republicans, Democrats and independents oppose Bush’s position on English versus Spanish and support Trump’s position.
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