In an interview with Fox and Friends Weekend, Former President Donald Trump highlighted his appeal with Latinos by boasting his performance during the 2016 elections in the Hispanic-heavy state of Texas:
"They've always liked me, and I've always liked them," he said. "You know, I've done well from the beginning. In 2016, I won the entire border along Texas, and they're all like 85% [Hispanic]."
However, Trump's claim is inaccurate. While he did win Texas by more than 800,000 votes in 2016, taking the state's electoral college votes, he did not secure the majority vote in most of the state's border counties.
In fact, of the 14 counties that comprise the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas, he won only five: Hudspeth (63.6% Hispanic/Latino), Jeff Davis (30.7% Hispanic/Latino), Brewster (41.5% Hispanic/Latino), Terrell (48.7% Hispanic/Latino), and Kinney (47.0% Hispanic/Latino).
Moreover, 10 of the 14 border counties have majority Latino populations, and Trump won only one of them.
Trump claimed he won all of the counties on the border of Texas in 2016. That would be true if he was talking about the border with Oklahoma. He didn't even come close to winning the counties that bordered Mexico - I provide receipts! Electoral map via - Politico pic.twitter.com/VhgSS7daU0
— Decoding Fox News (@DecodingFoxNews) June 5, 2024
Trump's performance in border counties saw improvements in the 2020 presidential election as he retained his majorities in the five counties he won in 2016 and took two more (Val Verde County and Zapata County).
It's not the first time that Trump has made this assertion. Back in 2022, while announcing he was to run for the country's highest office, he also claimed that every community along Texas' southern border supported him, adding that Gov. Greg Abbott called him to congratulate him for his success along the Texas-Mexico border.
In recounting the call between himself and the Texas governor, Trump said that Abbott told him: "you've done something that nobody else has done. You've won every single area along the border — it's the longest since Reconstruction."
Elsewhere in the Fox interview, Trump suggested that rising sea levels could actually have a silver lining: "a little more beachfront property":
"The single biggest threat — not global warming. When they say that the seas will rise over the next 400 years — one-eighth of an inch, you know. Which means, basically, you have a little more beachfront property, OK? Think of it. The seas are going to rise. Who knows? But this is the big threat. I watched Biden the other night [say], 'It's the greatest existential' — he loves that word, because it's a big word and ... he doesn't even know what the hell the word means. He goes, 'It's the greatest existential threat to our country.' Global warming."
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