A defiant President Donald Trump defended himself against charges of racism, a week after he touched off a national firestorm following white supremacist violence that claimed a life in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Speaking at a campaign-style rally in Phoenix, Virginia, the president recounted a trio of separate statements that he gave, highlighting the words that he said ‘the very dishonest media’ twisted in order to make a case that he is a bigot.
‘What happened in Charlottesville strikes at the core of America,’ he said, adding that ‘I spoke out forcefully against hatred, bigotry and violence, and forcefully condemned the white supremacists and the KKK.’
‘I openly called for healing and love, and they all know it since they were all there,’ he said of the political press corps.
Reporters heard 10,000 people chanting ‘CNN sucks!’ ‘Shame on you’ and ‘Tell the truth.’
President Donald Trump insisted Tuesday in Phoenix, Arizona that a ‘dishonest’ political press corps had distorted his words following the Charlottesville violence
A crowd of about 10,000 greeted him at the Phoenix Convention Center, including men dressed in revolutionary garb
A sea of people chanted ‘CNN sucks!’ and ‘Tell the truth!’ as Trump bashed the media for what he claimed is an institutional bias against him
Trump blamed reporters for framing him as a racist, and thousands lavished praise on him for defending himself in the face of feirce media criticism
‘I said “racism is evil”! Trump recalled. ‘Did they report that I said racism is evil? No? You know why? Because they are very dishonest people.’
Trump ultimately charged that ‘the only people giving a platform to these hate groups is the media itself and the fake news.’
‘I believe they really don’t love our country,’ he said.
‘I’m really doing this to show you how damned dishonest these people are,’ Trump told his crowd, recounting the initial statement ten days ago when he declared that ‘we condemn in the strongest personal terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence.’
‘You can’t do much better, right?’ Trump asked, then bashing journalists who insisted that, ‘he didn’t say it fast enough. He didn’t do it on time. Why did it take a day? He must be a racist.’
Reading aloud from subsequent statements, Trump emphasized the messages of love and compassion that were largely overlooked, and recalled how he had said ‘thugs’ among white supremacists in Charlottesville were ‘hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold true as Americans.’
Trump singled out Fox News as an outlet that has shied away from bashing him gratuitously, praising the ‘Fox & Friends’ program and host Sean Hannity by name.
‘You have some great networks. Fox has treated me fairly,’ he said. Trump also pledged Tuesday to put pressure on Democrats and recalcitrant Republicans to turn his campaign promises into law.
‘We are fully and totally committed to fighting for our agenda, and we will not stop until the job is done.’
Protesters outside included some masked ‘AntiFa’ activists, whom Trump called out by name as a group from on stage
Trump swung through Phoenix on Tuesday for a campaign rally designed to fire up his base in a state where he beat Hillary Clinton by 3.5 percentage points last year. Trump (right) and Vice President Mike Pence deplane Air Force One in Phoenix on Tuesday
Arizona’s Republican governor Doug Ducey (left) greeted Trump at the Phoenix airport but he did not attend the evening rally
As Trump took the stage at the Phoenix Convention Center, a sea of cell phones rose above a standing crowd that strained to fit inside the space’s walls.
In a place that is 2,300 miles distant from Washington – and seems a universe away from the seat of his recent troubles – he told his base that they ‘understood what D.C. did not.’
‘Every American is entitled to a government that puts their needs first,’ Trump said, calling on his supporters to back him in a move ‘to rebuild our country, to take care of our people.’
At that note a quartet of protesters began yelling. As close as 15 feet away, it was impossible to tell what they were saying before police led them out.
But Trump reinforced his populist message while he stressed national unity.
‘We are all on the same team,’ he said. ‘We are all Americans. And we all believe, right now, in “America first.”‘
Trump’s swing through Phoenix, the site of his first big 2015 campaign rally, was designed to fire up his base in a state where he beat Hillary Clinton by a tenuous 3.5 percentage points last year but is polling 7 points lower there than his election total.
In contrast with Monday’s calm, measured speech about the prolonged war effort in Afghanistan, Tuesday night’s Trump performance was a raucous affair akin to the campaign events that forced America’s election prognosticators to rewrite every political rule book.
Police separated protesters from a line of Trump rally-goers that stretched six city blocks before the campaign rally outside the Phoenix Convention Center
Pro-Trump activists gave as good as they got, cheering for Trump and shouting back at his detractors
The president’s first audience members began arriving 10 hours before the rally’s appointed starting time, standing in Phoenix’s concrete city center in temperatures that reached 107 degrees.
Two-dollar cold water bottles outsold three-dollar tacos on street corners. Trump fans took turns holding each other’s places in line for bathroom breaks and visits to a cool spray mist descending from a nearby Hyatt hotel’s entryway overhang.
The most common sight, other than ‘Make America Great Again’ hats, was umbrella after umbrella sticking up above the crowd – not to protect against much-needed rain, but used as a parasol to tame the heat.
The heat took its toll, too, on a promised mass-protest that threatened to bring thousands who stayed home.
A combined 7,400 people had indicated that they plan to show their disgust for the president, via RSVPs on two Facebook advertisements for anti-Trump rallies.
Only about 500 showed up, and found pro-Trump activists creating just as much noise. They shouted ‘Walk of shame!’ in response as the rally-goers made their way to the front of a line that snaked for six city blocks.
An hour before Trump was scheduled to speak, there were an estimated 8,000 inside the convention center. That crowd grew to more than 10,000.
The anti-Trump protesters were energetic and loud, but far outnumbered and kept at bay by police
At its peak the left-wing protest crowd reached into the hundreds, a far cry from the thousands expected by organizers who collected RSVPs on Facebook
Trump has spoken at the Phoenix Convention Center before, a late-October 2016 rally where his establishment-rattling immigration message was temporarily overshadowed by a fan who appeared to chant ‘Jew-S-A’ at reporters as he left the venue.
The man, George Lindell, later claimed he was misunderstood.
‘When you pronounce “USA” in Spanish it sounds like “Jew S. A.”,’ Lindell said, adding: ‘We need to integrate the Spanish lingo, the Spanish language into our society.’
Trump’s return to Phoenix on Tuesday came with its own newer set of controversies.
The White House diffused the most explosive one by telling reporters aboard Air Force One that there would be no announcement of a presidential pardon for embattled former sheriff Joe Arpaio, a Trump endorser who faces a possible prison term for defying a judge’s order related to illegal immigration in 2011.
‘There will be no discussion of that today at any point, and no action will be taken on that front at any point today,’ White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said.
Trump’s Arizona swing started with a reminder of his laser focus on illegal immigration, visiting with Yuma, Arizona-based Marines who work with U.S. Border Patrol agents and inspecting a Predator drone that they use to patrol the border U.S. with Mexico.
Administration officials who briefed reporters on Tuesday pointed to a fortified border fence along the section of border nearest to Yuma, and said it was largely responsible for a dramatic drop in people illegally making it from Mexico to the United States.
The president started his Arizona swing in Yuma, meeting with U.S. border Patrol agents and inspecting the hardware they use to fight illegal immigration and human trafficking
Southern Arizona Militia, a private group (left), stood guard outside the Phoenix Convention Center before the rally for Trump. Separately, a left-wing group called the John Brown Gun Club (right) brought its own armed watchdogs
That number was down 46 per cent in the first seven months of 2017, compared to 2016.
The fence has been up since 2008, however, and numbers have been steadily decreasing since at least 2005.
Republican partisans and Trump himself have suggested that his election victory by itself signaled a coming change in policy that made human traffickers re-think their strategies.
Yet the president missed a chance to pose in front of the imposing border barrier that was just 15 miles away from his stop in Yuma, with one administration official blaming unspecified ‘security concerns.’
Trump’s visit to Arizona brought the state’s sometimes smashmouth GOP politics to a head since there is no love lost between Trump and Arizona’s two U.S. senators, both Republicans.
Trump has battled with arizona Republican Senator Jeff Flake, who was among the ‘Gang of Eight’ who proposed in 2013 giving legal status to millions of illegal immigrants
Trump called Flake ‘toxic’ and said he’s ‘WEAK’ on borders and crime
Coming into Tuesday’s rally, the president had all but endorsed Flake’s primary challenger Kelli Ward, and an intra-party war has broken out over what promises to be a bruising primary race
Sen. Jeff Flake faces a stiff primary challenge next year from former state lawmaker Kelli Ward, whom Trump has cheered on Twitter as he called Flake ‘WEAK on borders’ and ‘toxic’ in the Senate.
Flake’s recent anti-Trump manifesto ‘Conscience of a Conservative’ rankled the president. In the first half-dozen pages he calls Trump’s famed Twitter feed ‘all noise and no signal,’
‘Volatile unpredictability is not a virtue,’ Flake adds. ‘We have quite enough volatile actors to deal with internationally as it is without becoming one of them.’
Most telling, Flake skewers his fellow lawmakers who went along with Trump’s rise to power as the lesser of two evils – the greater being Hillary Clinton.
‘We pretended that the emperor wasn’t naked,’ he writes.
‘Even worse: We checked our critical faculties at the door and pretended that the emperor was making sense.’
Despite his stinging critiques, Flake has sided in Congress with many of Trump’s proposals, including two votes to repeal the Obamacare law.
Still, Trump seems prepared to throw one brushback pitch after another at Flake’s head, sending a message to other recalcitrant Republicans to get in line and follow his lead.
Trump greeted U.S. Marines on Tuesday in Yuma, Arizona before departing for Phoenix
Then-candidate Trump was joined by Joe Arpaio, then the sheriff of metro Phoenix, at an Iowa campaign event in January 2016. Despite Trump coming back to Arizona at a crucial moment in his presidency, Arpaio will not be the beneficiary of his first presidential pardon on Tuesday
The Republican establishment is firing back.
On Tuesday the Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC run by a former chief of staff to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, released a vicious digital ad targeting Ward as a lunatic with ‘crazy ideas’ who engages in ’embarrassing behavior.’
In a sign of battle lines being drawn, Trump donor Robert Mercer – the billionaire whose money funds the Breitbart News website – donated $300,000 to a pro-Ward super PAC.
Arizona’s Republican governor Doug Ducey found a way to avoid alienating either side of the spat on Tuesday, saying he would greeting Trump at the Phoenix airport but skipping the evening rally.
At least three Arizona Republican members of the House of Representatives were on hand: Andy Biggs, Trent Franks and Paul Gosar.
Phoenix’s Democratic mayor called on Trump last week to cancel or postpone Tuesday’s rally.
Despite garnering precious op-ed space in The Washington Post, he found himself screaming into a stiff wind.