Last week, when Donald Trump first announced his intentions on running for President in 2016, it created several waves across the entertainment industry, and gave The Daily Show seemingly endless amounts of material for the near future. One possibly unforeseen circumstance is that Univision has chosen to completely drop the Miss USA pageant telecast from its schedule in reaction to the many harsh words Trump had to say about Mexican immigrants, and the show’s Univision simulcast hosts Roselyn Sánchez and Cristián De La Fuenta have dropped out of the gig. He definitely failed the personality interview on that one.
The Miss Universe Organization is a co-venture between Trump and NBCUniversal, and the loss of Univision, the largest Spanish-language broadcaster in the U.S., is a major setback for the pageant. But it’s not that much of a surprise, given how harshly he spoke of Mexican citizens making their way into the U.S. as part of his announcement speech. Here’s the main portion that got people upset.
When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best…They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, their rapists, and some, I assume, are good people. But I speak to border guards and they tell us what we’re getting.
According to CNN, one of Univision’s hosts, Jorge Ramos, called the comments “absurd” and “prejudiced.” (And I’m betting he had more to say about it off the record.) But the biggest blow came when Univision formally announced that they were severing ties with not only the Miss USA pageant, but everything else involving Donald Trump by way of business ventures.
Here’s how they responded through a statement.
At Univision, we see first-hand the work ethic, love for family, strong religious values and the important role Mexican immigrants and Mexican-Americans have had and will continue to have in building the future of our country. We will not be airing the Miss USA pageant on July 12 or working on any other projects tied to the Trump Organization.
As you can imagine, Trump wasn’t too pleased about this, as the network is reportedly breaking a five-year contract with Trump and NBC to air and co-produce the show. He told TMZ that he would be suing Univision for “hundreds of millions of dollars” for their breach, and he went on to say that Univision reps apologized to him after dropping the telecast, asking him to soften his views about Mexico, if he wouldn’t stop talking about it altogether. Trump had a few things to say on Twitter about it, including this.
This isn’t the first time that someone has pissed Trump off where the Miss USA pageant is concerned, and we’ll just have to wait and see if NBC decides to flock to Telemundo to air the telecast, or if they’ll take the fight to Trump himself.
