Many recent American politicians have believed that they could speak Spanish. Presidential candidate George W. Bush stumbled through a Spanish-language interview and was rewarded with thirty-five per cent of the Latino vote in the 2000 election. His brother Jeb, whose wife is Mexican-born, is a fluent speaker, but when he appealed to Spanish-speakers during the 2016 Republican Party primary, he received a typically brutal slap-down from Donald Trump. ‘This is a country,’ Trump chided his rival ‘where we speak English, not Spanish.’