Spanish version of WhiteHouse.gov goes dark in Trump's America
The Spanish-speaking version of the White House website was taken down on Day One of Donald Trump's U.S. presidency.
The page, previously maintained by the Barack Obama and George W. Bush administrations, went dark by late Friday afternoon, as Inverse reports. Now the link WhiteHouse.gov/espanol leads to a 404 page with a message that reads "Sorry, the page you're looking for can't be found."
Among other changes to the official website of the new presidential administration are the addition of strong statements of support for gun rights and law enforcement and the removal of prior information outlined by the Obama administration about climate change policy and the Affordable Care Act, as described by The Washington Post.
Within the first few hours of Trump's inauguration on Friday, the official White House website's 114 page links had dwindled down to just 38, according to Inverse. Meanwhile, the entire Spanish-speaking website itself was no longer anywhere to be found.
As of Monday, the White House's Spanish-speaking Twitter page, @LaCasaBlanca, had posted no tweets either.
Eliminating the White House's Spanish translations online seems to reflect sentiments Trump shared during his presidential campaign, when he criticized any speaking of Spanish within U.S. borders.
During a Republican presidential debate back in September, he defended his criticisms of Jeb Bush for speaking Spanish along the campaign trail.
"We have a country, where, to assimilate, you have to speak English," Trump said. "And I think that where [Bush] was, and the way it came out, didn't sound right to me. We have to have assimilation to have a country."
"This is a country where we speak English, not Spanish," he added emphatically.
Such a statement probably went down pretty well with the Trump supporters from the so-called alt-right movement, who have advocated white nationalist policies like ethnic cleansing.
Still, on Monday, the president's press secretary, Sean Spicer, told reporters that getting rid of the White House page for Spanish speakers was not actually intentional. Rather, he said, the new administration is still figuring things out.
“We hit the ground running on Day One. There was a lot of work to do, and we had done a lot of work on the website to make sure that we were prepared to get as much information up as fast as possible,” he said, according to The Washington Post. “We are continuing to build out the website both in the issue areas and in that area. But we’ve got the IT folks working overtime to continue to get all of that up to speed. Trust me, it’s going to take a little bit more time, but we’re working piece by piece to get that done.”
The new White House website's evolution hasn't gone unnoticed in the Twitterverse.
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Topics Donald Trump
Marissa is a real-time news intern at the LA office. She has a bachelor's degree in political science from UC Santa Barbara and a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University. She's a free spirit.
