So Goes The Nation

Who will win Florida’s Latino voters?

- Jonathan Blitzer

One afternoon last February, Donald Trump stood at a lectern at Florida International University, in Miami, and before a cheering crowd of a thousand called President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela a “dictator” and a “Cuban puppet.” Trump was flanked by two enormous flags, Venezuelan and American, and the word Democracia flashed on a screen behind him. Chants in Spanish alternated between thanking Trump (“We’re with you!”) and taunting Maduro (“He’s already fallen!”). “It was like a rock concert,” Rafael Fernandez, who left Venezuela nearly two decades ago, told me.

The Trump Administration had recently instituted sanctions against Venezuela’s state oil company, which supplies the overwhelming majority of the government’s budget, and more than fifty countries, including the U.S., now recognized the opposition leader, Juan Guaidó, as the country’s legitimate President. Trump had also floated the possibility of a military intervention. Marco Rubio, the Republican senator from Florida, who is influential on Latin American issues, claimed that highranking officers in the Venezuelan military were poised to defect. Addressing those who weren’t, Trump warned, “You will find no safe harbor, no easy exit, and no way out. You’ll lose everything.”

Fernandez was in the audience with his father, Francisco. The two argued constantly about Trump. Rafael told me that he was “more pro-Trump than anti.” His father, a former Venezuelan politician, is a lifelong conservative, but when he voted for the first time in an American election, in 2016, it was for Hillary Clinton; he despised Trump.