Washington, DC, October 29, 2024 --  

Cuban-Americans were the first minority group to fall under Trump's spell. Vietnamese-Americans may not be far behind.

When former President Donald Trump visited the Little Saigon neighborhood of suburban Washington in August, it was one of the stranger moments in America's political realignment. The campaign stop featured a short stop at Truong Tien restaurant where Trump praised the Vietnamese community before ordering takeout.

Trump words that day said it all: "Somehow, I don’t know what it is, you’ll have to explain it, but the Vietnamese community loves me."¹

Strange but possibly true. According to the Pew Research Center, Vietnamese-Americans stand out amongst other Asian-American communities as being far more Republican -- 51 percent for Vietnamese Americans vs. 34 percent for Asian-Americans as a whole.² Vietnamese Americans were also well-represented in the pro-Tump mob that attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Five of the 716 people charged as of July 2023 were of Vietnamese ancestry.³ For this year's election, there have been no polls published with sufficient samples of Vietnamese-Americans to definitively verify Trumps's claim to their love. But anecdotal evidence suggest it may be true.

Virginia's Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate is Hung Cao, a Vietnamese-American who stood at Trump's side in his August visit to the Vietnamese restaurant. Cao fled with his family to the United States before the fall of Saigon in 1975 and later graduated from a prestigious high school just a few miles away from Little Saigon.

Polls show that Gao has little chance of beating the popular Democratic incumbent Senator Tim Kaine. Yet Cao's pro-Trump rhetoric has served as a billboard for his community's identification with Trumpy politics. Strangely for an immigrant refugee, Cao's campaign has regularly demonized recent immigrants to America. "The selling-out of our country for the benefit of illegal aliens will end. November 5th is Liberation Day!" he posted to his Twitter account earlier this month.⁴ Another post painted Venezuelan immigrants fleeing its Marxist regime as criminals⁵ -- a head scratching position for a fellow refugee from communism.

But sadly, the pro-Trump drift of the Vietnamese community is not an outlier. The same thing happened to the Cuban-American community during Trump's first term. Between 2016 and 2020, Florida's Cuban vote for Trump grew from 54 precent to 62 percent⁶ helping turn a former swing-state into a Republican bastion for the Trump era.

As immigrant communities, the Vietnamese and Cubans have many things and common. Both are led by older refugees who fled communist countries. Both largely have family-oriented Roman Catholic cultures. Such attributes make them more receptive to conservative politics in general. But it still seems a bit strange to see immigrants who came to America in search of freedom cheering on an authoritarian populist seeking to deport other immigrants, many of whom also escaped Marxist regimes. Trump even sought to deport large numbers of long-term Vietnamese immigrants back in 2019, but backed down before very many were sent back.⁷

The other thing that unites Vietnamese and Cuban-Americans is the self-perception (largely deserved) that they are American success stories. Both communities have high levels of entrepreneurship and educational attainment. Both have patriotic feelings about America, a country that took them in (or at least their parents or grandparents) when times were tough. They genuinely do seem to love America.

So why do they also love Trump? It doesn't make any logical sense to those of us not under Trump's spell, but love often doesn't make sense. Love for Trump is all about how the celebrity turned politician makes people feel. Facts aside, Trump makes people feel that he is a successful businessman. Facts aside, he makes them feel that he is a patriot. Facts aside, he makes them feel that he is one of them.

On a personal level, there is no point in arguing merits once somebody has fallen under love's spell. The same is also true of politics. That is unfortunate, given the potentially serious consequences facing those of us who do not share their love.

Notes:

1. Fox 5 DC, FULL SPEECH: Trump and Hung Cao visit Vietnamese Community in Virginia, August 26, 2024

2. Pew Research Center, Asian Voters in the U.S. Tend to be Democratic, but Vietnamese American Voters are an Exception, May 25, 2023

3. Seton Hall University, A Demographic and Legal Profile of January 6 Prosecutions, July 26, 2023

4. Twitter, Hung Cao, October 25, 2024

5. Ibid, October 28, 2024

6. Politico, New Poll Shows Cuban-American Voters Align With GOP, March 16, 2021

7. National Public Radio, 40 Years After The Vietnam War, Some Refugees Face Deportation Under Trump, March 4, 2019