In his first day in office, President Biden’s administration relaunched online Spanish-language communications that had been previously discontinued under the Trump Administration. The Trump Administration was the first in two presidencies not to maintain a Spanish-language version of the White House’s official website.
Shortly after the inauguration ended on Jan. 20, the Spanish-language version of whitehouse.gov went live for the first time since 2017. The website first launched in 1994 under President Clinton; under President Bush, a Spanish-language version was introduced and it had been maintained through the Obama Administration as well. Soon after President Trump entered the office, the Spanish-language version of the site was removed.
While Trump officials insisted early on in his presidency that the Spanish language version of the site would return shortly, it never did—throughout the four years of Trump’s presidency, the URL for the Spanish-language site would display an error message.
According to CNN, the White House did maintain a Twitter account, @LaCasaBlanca, which published in Spanish throughout the duration of Trump’s tenure as president. However, as the Guardian noted in 2017, under the Trump Administration, the Twitter account was much less active than it was during President Obama’s tenure—the tweets also frequently featured errors, such as missing accent marks.
The Biden Administration will continue to use the Twitter account alongside the official Spanish version of whitehouse.gov to communicate with the nation’s Spanish-speaking residents.
The move to relaunch the Spanish-language version of the website can be seen as a reflection of the nation’s linguistic diversity—more than 50 million residents of the United States speak Spanish on a regular basis, and it’s the second most widely spoken language in the country, after English.
