Jake Tapper Confronts Jasmine Crockett Over Suggesting Hispanic Trump Voters Have ‘Slave Mentality’

CNN’s Jake Tapper pressed Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) over whether she believes Hispanic voters supportive of President Donald Trump have a “slave mentality” on Tuesday.

Crockett, who is now running for a Senate seat, joined Tapper on CNN’s The Lead where Tapper at one point brought up a quote from Crockett on Hispanic Trump voters that received backlash last year.

In a December 2024 Vanity Fair interview, Crockett compared Latino Trump voters to slaves who “hate” themselves while trying to explain support for Trump’s deportation initiatives.

“It almost reminds me of what people would talk about when they would talk about kind of like ‘slave mentality’ and the hate that some slaves would have for themselves,” she said at the time. “It’s almost like a slave mentality that they have. It is wild to me when I hear how anti-immigrant they are as immigrants, many of them. I’m talking about people that literally just got here and can barely vote that are having this kind of attitude.”

“Now around the time that was published last year, around a million Latino voters in Texas were voting for Trump,” Tapper noted on Tuesday. “Do they all have slave mentality?”

Crockett pushed back on the framing of what she said.

“No, and that‘s not what that said at all, to be clear. It did not say that every Latino has that type of mentality,” she said.

“No, no, but the ones that vote for people that believe in strong or Trump‘s immigration policy,” Tapper responded.

“I don’t believe that the people that voted for Trump believe in what they’re actually getting. That is number one. What Trump said is that he was going to kick out the bad guys. And that‘s what I was talking about,” Crockett said.

She continued:

I am talking about exactly what was going on when I was down there on behalf of the Beto [O’Rourke] campaign. In fact, when he was running for governor, I was sent as a surrogate and I said, talk to me about what is going on. Why is it that they believe that they can win Latinos down here? Like, I don’t understand what’s happening. And there were people that were saying that they had fought and they had done everything the right way, and that there were bad people that were coming that were doing it the wrong way. And so they were saying, no, we left. And I mean, when you think about people that are leaving asylum, they are leaving areas and situations that they feel like are harmful to them. So yes, they’re like, no, I don’t want to be in this dangerous situation. And that’s what I meant.

Watch above via CNN.