Latino singing sensation Ricky Martin has weighed in on the Trump factor, and the presidential hopeful’s very public and widely reported dispute with Univision and correspondent Jorge Ramos at a recent press conference, calling out the billionaire as “racist” and “xenophobic” and saying he should cease and desist his rhetoric.
“The fact that an individual like Donald Trump, a candidate for the presidency of the United States for the Republican party, has the audacity to continue to gratuitously harass the Latin community makes my blood boil,” Martin wrote, according to a translation posted on Billboard and reported by MSNBC. “When did this character assume he could make comments that are racist, absurd, and above all incoherent and ignorant about us Latinos?”
Martin went on the decry Trump’s toss of Ramos from a press conference earlier this week after the Univision correspondent repeatedly interrupted the campaign event to query about immigration and demand explanation for how the candidate, if elected, would deport so many individuals.
Martin called on fellow Latinos to “defeat the power that Trump pretends to have over [us.] Let’s show that our Latin race is to be respected, let’s not allow a political hopeful to plant his campaign in insult and humiliation. Let’s demand respect for those first generations of Latinos who came to the United States and opened a path for us. We have fought for every right that we have today.”
Martin’s call to action comes on the heels of revelations about Ramos’s daughter. Widely reported Thursday during discussions about the Trump-Ramos dispute was this at-first omitted fact: The Univision correspondent’s daughter works for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
The finding is somewhat of an embarrassment to Ramos, who came clean on the Fusion website with this post: “As journalists the most important thing we have is our credibility and integrity. We maintain that, in part, through transparency with our audience, our colleagues and our critics. That is why I am disclosing that my daughter, Paola, has accepted a position working with Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.”