SPAIN PERSPECTIVE

Madrid, May 28, 2026. From the columns of El País, Trump's defeat in federal courts over the Southern electoral redistricting maps in the US is part of a larger picture: that of a president who multiplies fronts and starts to pay the political price. For Spanish media, it's not just a judicial defeat; it's a revealer of the internal contradictions of Trumpism, 17 months into his second term.

The connection between this institutional defeat and the fate of the Hispanic diaspora is at the heart of Madrid's analysis. A bipartisan survey published on Wednesday by the Latino organization UnidosUS, conducted among 3,000 voters between April 27 and May 14, reveals that 67% of Latinos disapprove of the president's management, against 30% of approval. More striking: one in four Latinos who voted for Trump in 2024 says they wouldn't make the same choice. If midterm elections were held today, 54% of Hispanic voters would vote Democrat, against only 27% for Republicans. In April 2025, 82% of pro-Trump Latinos declared they still supported their vote; that number has plummeted.

"These numbers are not auspicious," notes Daron Shaw, a government professor at the University of Texas. "The Republican vote among Latinos is a relatively recent phenomenon, and losing that support is a problem for the Republican Party." For Madrid, this disaffection is not trivial: some 40 million Spanish speakers live in the US, and their electoral weight in Southern states — precisely those where electoral maps are contested — is decisive.

Meanwhile, El País closely follows the turmoil within the Republican camp. Texas Senator John Cornyn, after 25 years in the Capitol, was defeated in the Republican primary with 63% of the vote going to his rival Ken Paxton, whom Trump had chosen to support. Cornyn joins a growing list of Republican lawmakers eliminated by the president himself, deemed insufficiently loyal. This logic of purification weakens the cohesion of the Republican bloc in the Senate, complicating the defense of contested electoral maps.

Bilateral diplomatic tension adds another prism to Madrid's reading. US Ambassador to Spain Benjamin León Jr. defended Trump's criticism of the Sánchez government on Wednesday while dissociating the Spanish people from the controversy: "It's not against the Spanish people, it's against the government." He qualified the frustration of Washington over Spain's refusal to reach 5% of GDP in military spending as "justified." This American pressure, combined with the commercial embargo threats of last March, illustrates for Madrid how Trump's governance methods — including on technical issues like electoral borders — rely on a permanent logic of force.

Spanish media retain that Trump's judicial defeats occur in a context where his own institutional allies are weakening, his Hispanic base that contributed to his 2024 victory is slipping away, and federal courts continue to play their role as a counterpower. Three signals that Madrid, attentive to constitutional balances, judges particularly significant.