LETTER FROM MADRID

The White House's Spanish-language website once again displays an "error" message. During his first term in office, one of Donald Trump's first decisions was to remove Spanish from the official website and social media of the US president's office. It wasn't until 2021, when Joe Biden took office, that the country's second most widely spoken language – nearly 58 million speakers and around 42 million who speak Spanish at home, according to the 2023 census – reappeared on the White House website.

Just hours after Trump's inauguration, the Spanish version disappeared again, despite the Latino community's decisive support for his victory and the fact that there is no official language in the US. On January 22, Deputy Press Secretary Harrison Fields promised that the government would put the Spanish page back online "in a short timeline," but once the process of "editing and tweaking" the site had been completed, it was still unavailable. The same promise was made in 2017. And as in 2017, the removal of Cervantes' language from the site caused a stir in Spain.

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