How do you say “whoops” in Vietnamese? Derek Tran would like to know.
Tran, 43, is one of those unelected Democrat fresh faces running for Republican-controlled House seats that the media loves to highlight every election cycle. The pattern is the same, but the story always comes with a twist.
This time, it’s that Tran — who seeks to oust GOP Rep. Michelle Steel in California’s 45th Congressional District — is the child of Vietnamese refugees and was billed as the “the only candidate that speaks fluent Vietnamese,” according to the New York Post.
That’s no small deal in a district that spans Los Angeles and Orange Counties and where where the largest demographic is those of Asian descent, who make up over 37 percent of the population. Vietnamese is also the third-most spoken household language in the district.
On Friday, Tran received a glowing write-up in the Los Angeles Times, noting that the district “has the largest population of people of Vietnamese descent outside of Vietnam, but has never had a Vietnamese American representative in Washington.
“Democrats hope Tran can buck that trend. To beat Republican Rep. Michelle Steel, 69, a formidable fundraiser with deep ties to the Orange County GOP, Tran is pushing to win over Vietnamese voters, many of whom have been loyal Republicans since the 1980s.”
Sara Sadhwani, an assistant professor of politics at nearby Pomona College, said that he has a shot, given that “ethnicity and the shared identity between candidates and voters does tend to matter.” (That being said, Steel is also of Asian descent, and her campaign “questioned whether Tran can win a significant percentage of Vietnamese voters, saying their own analysis of primary precinct data showed Steel received more votes in the most Vietnamese-heavy areas of the district than Tran and [primary challenger Kim] Nguyen-Penaloza combined.”)
That kind of stuff got pushed to the background in the profile, however, and you read a lot more piffle like this: “Tran said that his campaign has been buoyed by Vietnamese Americans who are thrilled to have a candidate who ‘can finally represent us.’ He said some conservative voters have been swayed by his family’s story and his military service; he spent eight years in the U.S. Army Reserve, including a stint on active duty in 2003 on a homeland security detail at Georgia’s Ft. Stewart.”
However, stuck at the end of what might as well have been a paid political advertisement for Tran was this paragraph: “Tran said Vietnamese was his first language, but he has lost his childhood fluency. He understands most of what’s said to him, he said, but uses a translator ‘because I don’t want any of my messaging to get lost from my broken Vietnamese.’”
Do you think most Democrats are natural liars?
Wait, what?
Let’s rewind the clock a day, because I think the Times’ piece reads somewhat differently before a New York Post story challenged Tran’s claim to be a fluent Vietnamese speaker.
“During a Feb. 23 interview with Saigon Entertainment Television, a California-based, Vietnamese-language TV station, Tran stumbled right out of the gate when asked a question in his purported native tongue,” the outlet reported.
“‘In my 10 years working as a lawyer, I’ve done a lot of cases dealing with employment law, discrimination, harassment and really wrongful termination,’ Tran told his interviewer, before going on to discuss his legal career.
“‘The question was how many years you serve in the Army,’ she said. ‘So let’s address that and then I will cover the rest.’”
Forget AI putting white collar professionals out of work. Let’s worry about reality putting satirists out of work. That seems to be a more pressing concern these days.
For the rest of the interview, he leaned on the translator. That became a common theme in his appearances with the Vietnamese community in the district since.
“Four days later, the same translator sat down with Tran for an interview broadcast on Little Saigon TV, asking questions of the candidate in English while repeating his responses in Vietnamese after he spoke,” the Post reported. “Tran used the same system when speaking to Asian American voters during a June 8 campaign event.”
“Another appearance shows him reading a speech in Vietnamese off of a sheet of paper and then reading the speech in English,” the Post noted, implying he basically got through his halting remarks by relying on phonetically reciting a language he’s supposedly fluent in.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee initially attacked any intimation that Tran was misrepresenting his fluency.
“Army Veteran, small business owner, and Vietnamese American Derek Tran is the pride and joy of Little Saigon, which is one of many reasons MAGA Michelle Steel and her desperate NRCC lackeys know they will lose this November,” said DCCC spokesperson Dan Gottlieb via a statement. “Instead of launching bad faith attacks on the cultural heritage of the son of Vietnamese refugees — and openly insulting Vietnamese Americans from multiple generations all across California’s 45th — maybe Steel can find the courage to debate Derek and face up to her years of unchecked corruption in Congress.”
Except it wasn’t a “bad faith attack,” since Tran had been very, very clear about his bilingualism. In addition to the “only candidate that speaks fluent Vietnamese” statement, he also told the Orange County Register in October of 2023 that, “Being able to communicate with these older Vietnamese[,] I plan on organizing door-to-doors [sic] with my campaign.” The implication was that this didn’t involve bringing along a translator in tow.
Unsurprisingly, on the same day that the Los Angeles Times hagiography appeared, a separate article was published in the Post in which Tran acknowledged speaking only “broken Vietnamese,” does not have fluency in the language, and uses a translator “because I don’t want any of my messaging to get lost.”
So, in other words, he lied. Completely unlike other Democrats, of course.
I’m assuming the L.A. Times wasn’t planning on showcasing this side of Tran, however, when they initially started putting this profile together — hence, the hastily appended penultimate paragraph about that broken Vietnamese.
But the L.A. Times being the L.A. Times, they managed to smooth things over with the final graf: “Vietnamese elders, Tran said, have told him that they appreciate that he is making an effort.”
Right. Whoops.
