Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was criticized online this week after he quipped that he only speaks “American” during a speech in front of Latin American leaders at President Donald Trump’s Miami golf club this past weekend.
Hegseth cracked the joke after Trump similarly trumpeted his disinterest in learning other languages at the “Shield of the Americas” summit he hosted. The president said the purpose of the event was to coordinate joint U.S. and Latin American military action against cartels in the region, calling the effort “the Americas counter-cartel coalition.”
Trump told those at the summit that U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio “loves going to your countries” before acknowledging that Rubio, who speaks Spanish, has “a language advantage” over him.
“Because I’m not learning your damn language, I don’t have time,” Trump added, garnering laughs. “I was OK with languages, but I’m not going to spend time learning your language. That much I won’t do.”
“Just give me a good interpreter,” he continued, before going on a tangent about the importance of having a good interpreter.
Later, when Rubio addressed the crowd, he asked Trump for permission to speak in Spanish. Trump accepted, and after the secretary concluded his remarks, the president returned to the podium and jokingly asked the crowd: “Is he better in Spanish or in English? I think he’s better in Spanish.”
Then Hegseth took the podium.
“Mr. President, I only speak American,” he said, garnering some laughs — though the crowd’s response was noticeably more muted than after Trump’s jokes.
Hegseth was subsequently criticized and mocked on X for the remark, with many criticizing him for using “American” to refer to the English language.
Although Spanish is the second-most-spoken language in the U.S., Hegseth, Trump and many in the MAGAverse have a history of pushing English-only views — and the assumption that being “American” is synonymous with speaking English and exclusive to those from the United States.
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Last year, Trump signed an executive order designating English as the official U.S. language, though experts view his move as largely symbolic. He was also among the many conservatives who threw a fit when Puerto Rican global superstar Bad Bunny, a Spanish speaker, was announced as the 2026 Super Bowl halftime performer. Hegseth publicly celebrated when Turning Point USA announced right-wing counterprogramming that would run during Bad Bunny’s show.
Immediately after the halftime show, Trump lashed out on his Truth Social platform, calling Bad Bunny’s performance “an affront to the greatness of America.”
“Nobody understands a word this guy is saying,” Trump absurdly claimed at the time.
Jorge Coronado, professor of Latin American literatures and director of the Latin American & Caribbean Studies Program at Northwestern University, said that Trump and Hegseth’s latest remarks at the Shield of the Americas summit were not surprising.
“It’s no news to anyone that Trump’s administration has been, even by U.S. standards, remarkably outspoken about its xenophobia and in support of its white nationalism,” he told HuffPost. “[Trump’s] hostility to multilingualism, and the counterpart embrace of monolingualism, has a long legislative and cultural history in the US.”
“It seems clear to me and I think anyone who hears him that his insistence on English only is an integral part of the cultural politics of white nationalism and xenophobia,” he continued. “It’s ignorance as cultural and political strategy.”
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Hegseth’s quip was a signal to those “who support a white, English-only USA,” Coronado said.
Coronado believes Hegseth said he “only speaks American” for a reason.
“Hegeseth’s intention seems clear: to signal the fear and anxiety that other languages, and the people that speak them, create for those who support a white, English-only USA,” he said.
Coronado also thinks that Hegseth’s remark reflected a level of “arrogance,” considering that, in Spanish, “América” also refers to countries outside of the U.S. that are in the Western Hemisphere.
“While Latin Americans understand the U.S.-based use of ‘American’ to signal people and things originating in or related to the U.S., it’s long also been taken to be a signal of the U.S.’s arrogance vis a vis the hemisphere,” he said. “In Spanish, ‘América’ means the entire hemisphere, and so all people here are ‘americanos’ as Bad Bunny so joyfully pointed out.”
Toward the end of Bad Bunny’s historic Super Bowl performance, he shouted “God bless America,” before he listed countries from South, Central and North America and the Caribbean.
The singer then held up a football with a message that read: “Together, we are America.”
“To turn the term [America] into one that designates a language, as I understand Hegeseth did, is unusual but also part of an isolationist, go-it-alone proposal that unfortunately seems to [be] the current administration’s actual, and variously disastrous, political strategy in the world — Cuba, Venezuela and Greenland being only three recent examples,” Coronado said.
Coronado thinks that Hegseth’s “delusional idea that the U.S. only speaks English” is part of the Trump administration’s attack on higher education.
“Ignorance, or rather the call to ignorance, is very powerful and comfortable for the fearful,” he said. “And there is no doubt it unfortunately attracts votes from a significant portion of voters in the U.S.”
