In San Diego, Trump shames local ‘Mexican’ judge as protesters storm streetsBetween this, his attack on Susanna Martinez, etc, it seems that Trump has absolutely no intention of pursuing any sort of rapprochement with Hispanic voters. It also flies in the face of what Paul Manafort said a day or two ago Trump was going to do, with respect to Women, Hispanics, and Muslims.
Instead, if Trump has any strategy at all (and the more likely explanation is probably that he simply has none), it can only be a
Lee Atwater strategy. Trump is actively, intentionally trying to win
as few Hispanics as he possibly can, on the theory that the lower he can drive his numbers with Hispanics, the higher his numbers will go with whites. To some extent, that may even be true. The more vitriolic the anti-Trump protests become, the more they will seem "unreasonable" and "uncivil" to respectable whites, who will (to some degree) be driven into the waiting, welcoming arms of Trump.
The problem with this is that the nation in 2016 is different from the south in the 1960s and 70s, in twofold ways:
1) There are more minorities. If the only minority group were, for instance, Hispanics, then maybe Trump could win. But when Trump goes after Hispanics, other minority groups know that they could be next. This hurts him with other groups such as Asians, and Blacks as well. This even bleeds over to other groups who are minorities in other ways, such as religious minorities (e.g. Mormons and Muslims). The more diverse the nation becomes, the less effective attacking any one particular minority becomes, and the less viable is an election strategy based around dividing the populace up into one "us" in-group against another "them" out-group.
2) Whites are not so uniformly racist as in the South in the 1960s and 1970s. There are many liberal and moderate whites, and even some principled conservative whites, who are utterly turned off by Trump's
Atwater strategy, and want no part in it. An
Atwater strategy can only succeed when the majority (whites) is pliable enough so that it can be turned into a united, cohesive bloc. That is not the case with whites today.
