English should be the official language of the United States, says a new executive order signed by President Donald Trump on March 1, 2025. The move follows the Trump administration’s termination of the Spanish-language version of the White House website and its Spanish-language account on X, formerly Twitter.
Both were abruptly shut down within hours of Trump’s second presidential inauguration. Visitors to whitehouse.gov/espanol were met with “page not found” and a “GO HOME” button that sent the user to the English-language page. This button was later updated to read, “GO TO HOME PAGE.”
In halting its Spanish-language communications, the White House is ignoring the demographic reality of the US and rejecting a long-standing tradition in American government of making key civic information accessible to the public. These changes, while mostly symbolic, signal the Trump administration’s unwelcoming stance toward Spanish specifically and multilingualism in general.
Today, approximately 43 million people in the US speak Spanish as their primary language, representing roughly 14% of the entire population. If those who speak Spanish as their second language are included, then the US is the second-largest Spanish-speaking country in the world after Mexico.
Beyond population size, Spanish speakers help power the US economy, contributing an estimated US$2.3 trillion. That’s more than the gross domestic product of any other Spanish-speaking country in the world. With the help of its Spanish-speaking population, Miami is the financial and commercial capital of Latin America.
The Obama administration maintained the Spanish-language White House website launched under Bush.screenshot, CC BY-SA
In a press release, the Bush White House said that the new WhiteHouse.gov website would now “accomodate Spanish-speaking visitors.” It included both Spanish-language translations of the English materials, as well as feature stories relevant to the Hispanic community.
The Bush White House’s website was inclusive in other ways, too, with enhanced content for people who are hard of hearing or visually impaired and special content for kids.
Following the latest removal of whitehouse.gov/espanol, a White House spokesperson has again said that the administration is “committed to bringing back” the website, although no timeline was given.
US has multilingual history
The Trump administration’s effort to limit White House communication in languages other than English breaks with not just the recent past but also with the earliest traditions of the republic. Since the inception of the country, there has been a concerted effort to provide information to the public in relevant languages.
For example, the US Constitution was translated into German and Dutch in 1787 and 1788, languages that were widely spoken at the time, especially in New York, Pennsylvania and Maryland. These translations helped inform the public of the country’s foundational values and allowed for public engagement and participation during the ratification process.
The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican–American War and redrew the southern boundaries of the US, was written in both Spanish and English, ensuring that Spanish speakers in the territories newly claimed by the US were informed about their citizenship and rights.
Translators who spoke everything from Italian to Turkish to Albanian were stationed at Ellis Island in the early 20th century to help register and assist immigrants arriving to New York from across the globe. A few decades later, the US government produced World War I propaganda posters in various languages, hoping to convince a culturally and linguistically diverse American public to support the war effort, buy war bonds and enlist in the military.
In 1964, the Civil Rights Act, which outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion and sex, also laid the legal foundation for multilingual services in federal assistance programs. In government programs such as Medicaid, people who speak a language other than English are entitled to treatment equal to that of English speakers.
The US has never embraced multilingualism. History is rife with campaigns to suppress “foreign” and Indigenous languages. But as these examples show, the US has often taken a policy approach that acknowledges the linguistic needs of the US public.
Spanish on the campaign trail, not in the White House
His campaign released several ads targeting swing states with large Spanish-speaking populations, such as Arizona and Nevada, and in October 2024 Trump even participated in a town hall meeting on the Spanish-language channel Univision, where audience members asked questions in Spanish.
The federal government continues to host Spanish-language information on a variety of agency websites and offers multilingual support for key civic processes, such as filing taxes and requesting passports. The shuttering of the Spanish-language White House website seems largely symbolic.
His executive order making English the official language of the US may end up being largely symbolic as well. It allows federal agencies to continue providing information in other languages, effectively separating Trump’s public stance from its practical implementation.
Trump, it seems, is willing to use Spanish on the campaign trail when it benefits him while reinforcing a public narrative of rejecting Spanish and Spanish speakers.
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