Republican nominee Donald Trump plans to link Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, the New York Times, Hillary Clinton, and the women he allegedly sexually assaulted, groped, or peeped on in the nude into one grand conspiracy theory.
Donald Trump will try to convince you a Mexican billionaire is behind his alleged sexual assaults
His latest plan is to attack billionaire Carlos Slim.
Photo by Ty Wright/Getty Images
Alex Abad-Santos is a senior correspondent who explains what society obsesses over, from Marvel and movies to fitness and skin care. He came to Vox in 2014. Prior to that, he worked at The Atlantic.
As early as Friday, Mr. Trump is planning to claim that Mr. Slim, as a shareholder of New York Times Co. and donor to the Clinton Foundation, has an interest in helping Hillary Clinton’s campaign, according to a Trump adviser.
Attacking the Mexican billionaire would allow Mr. Trump to hit several targets. He could slam the “failing” New York Times, which he says had to be “rescued” by a “foreigner” — Mr. Slim, the adviser said.
Anti-Mexican sentiment is one of the motors at the center of Trump’s presidential campaign.
When Trump announced his presidential run last year, he told the crowd that Mexico and its people were one of America’s biggest problems — the country, according to Trump, was sending drugs, crime, rapists, and its worst dunderheads into the US. This past June, Trump said that Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who was overseeing a lawsuit against Trump University, was a liability and ruled against Trump unfairly because of his Mexican heritage. The running theme of Trump’s campaign has been to build a gigantic wall to keep Mexicans out. Now the Slim conspiracy theory is a new chapter.
Slim is one of the richest people in the world, a billionaire businessman who makes his money in telecommunications and owns a global conglomerate company called Grupo Carso, which owns businesses that specialize in everything from education to technology to oil and financial services. He’s known as the “Warren Buffett of Mexico.”
Trump’s attack strategy is an effort to discredit the New York Times, which ran the story about two women alleging that Trump sexually assaulted them. Slim is a New York Times shareholder and donating to the Clinton Foundation, and Trump is trying to assert that Slim was somehow behind the two women coming forward (playing into the theory peddled by his campaign that they are reporting their sexual assault for fame and money) and at the same time affecting the reporting at the New York Times, which he has maintained has a bias against him.
The attack on Slim now joins the list of excuses and defenses — ranging from Beyoncé to Magic Mike, from one of the accusers not being pretty enough to assault to the claim that only certain planes’ armrests facilitate sexual assault — that Trump and his surrogates have made in trying to exonerate the presidential nominee from the accusations.
