Thread: Trump tells supporters, ‘We have to take back the heart of our country’

Trump tells supporters, ‘We have to take back the heart of our country’


Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump shakes hands as he arrives to speak at a rally Saturday in Phoenix. (Ross D. Franklin/AP)
By Philip Rucker and Robert Costa July 11 at 8:00 PM
PHOENIX — GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, whose caustic comments about Mexican immigrants have inflamed the immigration debate, told thousands of cheering supporters here Saturday that “we have to take back the heart of our country.”
“These are people that shouldn’t be in our country,” he said in a rambling, angry speech. “They flow in like water.” A man shouted from the crowd, “Build a wall!”
Basking in polls that show he is near the front of the crowded Republican field, Trump took obvious glee in mocking former Florida governor Jeb Bush, the establishment favorite who is setting fundraising records.
“How can I be tied with this guy?” Trump asked the crowd. “He’s terrible. He’s weak on immigration.”
The campaign said about 4,200 people gathered to hear Trump at the Phoenix Convention Center. As he railed against Spanish-language broadcaster Univision on stage, a handful of protesters in the crowd interrupted. Trump’s security guards arrived to break up the skirmish that broke out. His supporters screamed “USA! USA! USA!” in the protesters’ faces as the guards escorted them of the convention hall.
“I wonder if the Mexican government sent them over here,” Trump said from the stage. He assured the crowd, “Don’t worry, we’ll take our country back.”
Bush, immigrants and the Mexican government weren’t the only targets of Trump’s scorn: He also criticized Macy’s, NBC, Caroline Kennedy and, more than once, the press.
Trump walked off stage to Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It.”
“The silent majority is back and we’re going to take the country back,” he said as he exited.
Earlier, as his plush Boeing 757 headed from an appearance in Las Vegas to Phoenix, Trump sat in a leather chair, surrounded by binders of articles about him and sipping a Coca-Cola — the full-calorie kind, he noted, because, “Have you ever seen a thin person drinking Diet Coke?”
“Something is happening in America. You may not want to see it, but something big is happening. People are sick and tired of politicians, and I’m here for them,” he said in an interview. “I’m ready to go right at the Mexican government. I’m going to charge them $25,000 per illegal immigrant and, oh, I’ll make them pay.”
(In his Phoenix speech, Trump put the figure at $100,000.)
“Would Bush do that? Would Rubio? I don’t think so,” Trump added, taking aim at two of his more mainstream rivals, Bush and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.).
Polls consistently show that a majority of Americans, including most Republicans, support an overhaul of the law to give millions of undocumented immigrants a means of staying in this country legally. Republican leaders were determined to settle the issue after the damage it did to the party in the last presidential election.
After Trump repeatedly referred to illegal immigrants in the harshest of terms — calling them, among other things, killers and rapists — Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus called the celebrity mogul and asked him to tone things down. But that, if anything, has reinvigorated Trump and his vocal supporters.
The crowd here began lining up outside the convention center before dawn, with many spending hours in temperatures that exceeded 100 degrees.
Many blame illegal immigrants for crime and economic problems, but also express dismay over cultural changes.
“We don’t recognize our country anymore,” said Jan Drake, 72, who lives in a retirement community outside Phoenix. “If you’re coming into our country, you have got to conform to what we stand for. You speak English. You don’t try to change our country to what your country was.”
Watching Trump on television the past couple of weeks, Drake said she has become convinced that “he would be a very strong president. He doesn’t kowtow to anybody. The Republican Party will try to squeeze him out because they’re afraid of him. But he can tell them where to go — to pound sand.”
Lou Brudnock, 71, said he is attracted to Trump’s brash “truthfulness” and his willingness to be politically incorrect.
“This country today is sad, sad, sad,” Brudnock said. “You can’t say anything or they call you ‘a racist.’ It’s like we’re back in Nazi Germany. But look around, man. It’s people here reading and listening to his message.”
Burdock said he does not expect Trump to win the Republican nomination, much less the presidency. But in his view, that is beside the point.
“I hope he sends a message to these spineless politicians we have that they have to deal with the issues,” Burdock said. “They can’t hide under a rock. Immigration, the border, that’s the issue.”
While party leaders believe the celebrity billionaire has virtually no chance of actually getting the GOP nomination, he does have the potential to force more viable candidates in the field of 16 declared or likely contenders to lose their own footing on immigration. Republicans are handling him delicately for another reason as well: They fear he could decide to leave the GOP entirely and wage a well-funded third-party campaign.
But Trump has also, by virtue of his celebrity, provoked a backlash far more widespread than ever seen toward lesser-known immigration hardliners, such as former Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.). That means he could leave lasting damage to the GOP and whoever turns out to be its 2016 standardbearer.
[GOP leaders fear damage to party’s image as Donald Trump doubles down]
All of those crosspressures were in play on Saturday at Trump’s appearances here and in Las Vegas. More mainstream Republicans had anticipated the spectacle and made no secret of their concern.
“I had hoped that we had moved on from some of the coarse rhetoric,” said Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.). “When there’s so many candidates, you can appeal to a very small segment of the population and get news and get elevated.” Flake is a leading proponent of a comprehensive immigration measure that would include a path to citizenship for those who are in the country illegally.
Yet Arizona has been a hotbed of anti-immigration sentiment, having passed a 2010 law that requires law enforcement officials to check the immigration status of people they detain and suspect are in the country illegally.
Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio — who in some ways is the face of that law, having been the subject of racial-profiling lawsuits— helped warm up the crowd before Trump’s arrival.
“I know that Donald Trump is speaking out,” Arpaio said. “He’s getting a lot of heat. But, you know, there’s a silent majority out here.”
“We’re not silent anymore!” a man in the crowd screamed.
Arpaio brought up the mostly dormant questioning of President Obama’s birth certificate. He and Trump are perhaps the most vocal of the so-called “birthers,” who falsely contend that Obama was not born in the United States.
As the immigration issue moves again to the forefront, GOP presidential candidates confront a familiar challenge: During the primary season, they must deal with the anger and anxiety that many on the right feel about immigration. But they must do it in a way that will not damage their appeal to a broader electorate in November.
In addition to Trump’s bellicosity on the issue, it has also gained new attention after the June 30 shooting death of a woman along San Francisco’s heavily touristed waterfront, allegedly by an illegal immigrant who had been deported five times from the United States.
Trump — along with much of the rest of the Republican field— has criticized the policies of “sanctuary cities,” such as San Francisco, where officials cannot detain those they suspect of being in the country illegally unless they have other grounds to do so.
Republican strategists say that it is possible to address anxiety over immigration within the GOP base without alienating the electorate at large. Advisers to Bush and Rubio, for instance, say that their candidates can play a long game on the issue, continuing to make a case for comprehensive changes to the law, while waiting for the Trump boomlet to subside.
“Someone like Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio could do this with relative ease, which is to talk about the need for border security, be critical of sanctuary cities and to give voice to some of the problems created by illegal immigration,” said Peter Wehner, who was a top official in George W. Bush’s White House.
“You can give a fuller picture of those types of people who are coming to America who are not documented, who are not legal,” Wehner added. “And you can speak about them in a humane and decent and true way.”
The 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney, on other hand, offers what establishment Republican leaders say is a textbook example of how not to handle the issue.
After advocating “self-deportation” during the 2012 primary — essentially, the idea of making it so difficult for illegal immigrants to work, go to school or even live in the United States that they leave on their own — Romney went on to lose the Latino vote in the general election by more than 40 points. That is believed to have been a deciding factor in a number of swing states, including Florida, which Romney lost by less than a single percentage point.
And as the country grows more diverse, a task force commissioned by the Republican National Committee warned in 2013, the Republicans will find it harder to win the White House without significantly increasing their share of the Latino vote.

Karen Tumulty contributed to this report.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politi...y.html?hpid=z1

The Washington Post and the other liberal media broadcasts are pulling out all the stops trying to stop Trump's building momentum! Notice how this article desperately tries to convince people that Trump has no chance of winning and how some corporate socialist stooge like Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio would do a better job on immigration!

Ha! In your fast Washington Post commies!

W