‘A Mess’: What Anuel AA, Justin Quiles’ Trump Endorsement Says About the Latino Vote
Given that Donald Trump has been in politics for more than eight years, his rallies are pretty recognizable to most Americans — but the one in Johnstown, Pennsylvania last week was different. Trump wasn’t introducing a sheriff or a MAGA mayor. Instead, he surprised the crowd and all viewers by bringing out two reggaeton artists: Puerto Rican star Anuel AA and singer-and songwriter Justin Quiles.
Following his usual approach, Trump shamelessly laid out his cards upon introducing the artists. Calling them “Puerto Rican musical legends,” Trump asked the crowd, “Do you know who the hell they are? Come up here fast, fellas, come on, because I don’t think these people know who the hell you are. But it’s good for the Puerto Rican vote. Every Puerto Rican is going to vote for Trump right now. We’ll take it.”
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Taking the stage, Anuel anointed Trump “the best president the world has seen, this country has ever seen.”
“To all my Puerto Ricans let’s stay united, let’s vote for Trump,” he said. A video backstage shows him meeting Trump, giddy like a child on Christmas.
Quiles wasn’t far behind, lauding Trump as someone who is a “truth-teller” and not a puppet, and said he would help Puerto Rico.
“Thank you for sharing with us back there how important building back Puerto Rico is, and not only building out Puerto Rico, but let’s make America great again!” he exclaimed as he switched from a Make Puerto Rico Great Again hat to the former president’s traditional red MAGA cap.
Anuel isn’t the first major reggaeton artist to get involved in presidential politics. In 2008, John McCain rolled out an endorsement from “Gasolina”-singing legend Daddy Yankee, and in 2020 reggaeton wunderkind Bad Bunny gave permission for Joe Biden’s campaign to use his song “Pero Ya No” in an ad.
But it isn’t exactly shocking that Anuel would embrace Trump. He once rapped that he was “el más odiado y a la vez el más querido, soy como Donald Trump en los Estados Unidos” — “the most hated and at the same time the most loved, like Donald Trump in the United States.” On 2019’s Ven y Hazlo Tú, he crowed in Spanish, “Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Donald Trump, without selling kilos, I made a million.” In 2020, when he began to lose fans over the association, he was spotted at a MAGA election night party taking a photo with rapper Lil Pump, who was wearing a red MAGA cap. And while his musical influence has waned in recent years, after a string of albums that have failed to reach the heights of 2018’s Real Hasta La Muerte, his ego is as big as ever.
Part of the reason, the endorsements made waves, beyond the strong feelings many Latinos have towards Trump, is because many Latin artists have thus far stayed out of the presidential race, though that could change in the sprint to the fall.
For the former president, endorsements from Anuel and Quiles were transparently about reaching Puerto Ricans, particularly Puerto Ricans who live in the key electoral battleground of Pennsylvania, with its 19 electoral votes. The Pennsylvania Puerto Rican community grew 30 percent from 2010 to 2020 and while all 500,000 Puerto Rican residents in the state are not voters, the Democratic-leaning bloc could certainly affect the outcome in November, with Biden’s 2020 margin over Trump just an 80,000 vote difference.
In a presidential race that is often called a toss-up, the Anuel endorsement is a continuation of Trump’s strategy to reach Hispanic men through culture and sports. Bryan Lanza, a former Trump campaign and transition team official, said the engagement is “a far cry from 2016” when the Trump team “didn’t do anything aimed at Spanish-language culture.”
“When you look at the campaign, it does a lot to garner the under-35 male vote, and that’s this rapper’s appeal,” he said. “Polling shows they’re the most receptive, and Pennsylvania has a high population of Puerto Ricans and Spanish-language listeners.”
Puerto Rican journalist and MSNBC columnist Julio Ricardo Varela calls Trump’s focus on Puerto Ricans in Pennsylvania “eye-opening.”
“I don’t ever recall hearing Trump say we’re going after Puerto Ricans — that was not part of the 2020 campaign — but all of a sudden Puerto Ricans matter to him,” he tells Rolling Stone. “He knows he needs Puerto Ricans now so if you’re going to roll it out you might as well do it with the dude with 38 million Instagram followers.
Still, Anuel and Quiles’ endorsements were immediately met with anger online, particularly from prominent Puerto Ricans. Many of them pointed out Trump’s past treatment of Puerto Rico, such as when he called it “one of the most corrupt places on Earth” and questioned the death toll in the wake of the devastation of Hurricane Maria.
Few Puerto Ricans have forgotten that Trump once threatened to sell the island for Greenland.
Miles Taylor, former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security and the anonymous Trump official who wrote an op-ed for The New York Times about the resistance within the White House, said in 2020 that Trump once asked him and other officials if the U.S. could trade Greenland for Puerto Rico because “Puerto Rico was dirty and the people were poor.”
Reposting a photo of Anuel’s endorsement on Instagram, rising Puerto Rican urbano singer RaiNao wrote in Spanish simply: “What the hell is this?”
In an Instagram story responding to the endorsement, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is Puerto Rican (D-N.Y.), accused Anuel of forgetting that Trump wanted to sell their patria, and referred to a much-maligned scene in 2017 when Trump toured Hurricane Maria devastation, and decided to toss paper towels to supporters.
“That endorsement, the way he rolled that out — somebody get a Bounty quicker picker upper, because that was a mess,” she said.
The moment she was referring to happened on October 3, 2017, two weeks after the category five Hurricane Maria flattened Puerto Rico, observed by the White House press pool as Trump visited the island, toured hurricane damage, posed for photos, and gave a speech to American servicemembers. (I was the only Puerto Rican journalist following Trump then, and saw firsthand how Trump eyed cans of chicken on a table before tossing toilet paper rolls to the crowd, likely before deciding throwing cans at people would be even worse than soft paper towel rolls.)
“The paper towel thing, as much as it has been overplayed, it has become part of the cultural fabric of the typical American politician who looks down on the island and American politicians have a long history of that,” Varela adds.
But the seriousness of that day was about the controversy surrounding tragedy: the death toll from the hurricane. During his visit, the number was officially 16, and it only rose to 34 once his plane departed from the island. A year later, the Puerto Rican government revised the official number to 2,975, which drew Trump’s ire.
“3000 people did not die in the two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico,” Trump wrote then. “When I left the Island, AFTER the storm had hit, they had anywhere from 6 to 18 deaths. As time went by it did not go up by much. Then, a long time later, they started to report really large numbers, like 3000.”
For many Puerto Ricans and former fans of Anuel, it wasn’t that Anuel was supporting a Republican — but which Republican he was embracing.
Natascha Otero-Santiago, a Puerto Rican activist and Democrat in Orlando who launched Boricuas con Kamala, tweeted “Anuel who?” when she saw the news. She tells Rolling Stone that Anuel’s statement showed a lack of knowledge regarding Trump policies with Puerto Rico.
“For me the biggest disrespect was when [Trump] questioned the number of deaths of Hurricane Maria,” she said. “It doesn’t take you being left or progressive to know as a Puerto Rican what Trump did and didn’t do.”
Carlos Calderon, a Puerto Rican influencer and content creator on the island with over 1.5 million followers, is the type of fan immersed in reggaeton who used to listen to Anuel, but says he won’t any longer due to the endorsement.
“For a Puerto Rican, born and raised in Puerto Rico, it’s such a slap in the face,” he says. “It shows how much you don’t care about your people. Trump literally said ‘No one here is going to know who they are but we need the Puerto Rican vote.’ We’ve been used all of our lives and are not held up to the same standard as others. I can no longer support a man who would permit this level of disrespect towards us.”
“[Anuel] is not as relevant as he used to be,” Calderon adds. “But this gets people talking.”
Anuel’s outsized ego has been an issue his whole career. Back when Bad Bunny was calling himself the king of trap, Anuel countered that he was the god of trap — silly, but harmless. But in recent years, he’s started giving off a late-period Kanye vibe, publicly courting controversy and putting his personal melodrama on social media. His marriage to Yailin La Más Viral fell apart and turned into a weird triangle that included his friend-turned-foe Tekashi 69 as they hurled serious charges at each other, including domestic violence accusations.
Like the former president, Anuel also sees enemies, perceived or otherwise, everywhere he looks. He’s taken shots both on Instagram and in songs at his former girlfriend, the popular Karol G, and later her new boyfriend, the Colombian reggaeton star, Feid. He’s also gone after Bad Bunny, whom he used to collaborate with, leaving Anuel further isolated in the genre.
In one Instagram story this summer, Anuel laid out his approach lately: “I don’t want to fix things with anybody and I won’t stop showing who I am until my last breath!” he wrote.
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