Trump Attacks Judge Curiel's Mexican Heritage

The Attacks

In late May and early June 2016, Donald Trump launched a sustained public attack on U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who was overseeing two class-action fraud lawsuits against Trump University. In a series of rally speeches and media interviews, Trump argued that Curiel had “an inherent conflict of interest” because of his ethnic background.

“He’s a Mexican,” Trump told CNN’s Jake Tapper on June 3, when asked why he believed Curiel could not be impartial. “We’re building a wall between here and Mexico.” When Tapper pressed whether Trump was arguing that a judge could not do his job because of his race, Trump said, “I’m building a wall. It’s an inherent conflict of interest.”

Judge Curiel was born in Indiana. His parents had immigrated from Mexico.

Bipartisan Backlash

The remarks generated some of the most forceful pushback Trump had received from within his own party. House Speaker Paul Ryan, who had just endorsed Trump days earlier, called the comments “the textbook definition of a racist comment.” Senator Lindsey Graham urged Republicans who had endorsed Trump to rescind their endorsements, saying “this is the most un-American thing from a politician since Joe McCarthy.”

Newt Gingrich, one of Trump’s most prominent supporters, called the comments “inexcusable” and one of “the worst mistakes Trump has made.” Republican senators including Mark Kirk of Illinois withdrew their endorsements. Legal experts uniformly rejected Trump’s argument, noting that the idea that a judge’s ethnicity disqualified him from hearing a case was antithetical to the foundations of the American legal system.

The Broader Implication

Trump eventually expanded his argument, suggesting that a Muslim judge might also be unable to treat him fairly because of his proposed Muslim immigration ban. The logic — that any member of a group Trump had targeted might be biased against him — alarmed constitutional scholars who saw it as an assault on the independence of the judiciary.

The episode was particularly significant because it came just after Trump had secured enough delegates to clinch the Republican nomination. Rather than pivoting to a more inclusive general-election message, Trump doubled down on the kind of racially charged rhetoric that had defined his primary campaign. For many observers, the Curiel episode crystallized the question at the heart of the 2016 election: whether Trump’s norm-breaking behavior represented a temporary disruption or a fundamental transformation of American political culture.