Apologies for being late with the remainder of these updates: between poor Internet, constant driving, a lack of time, and having to finish my taxes, I had basically no time last week to do any of this. To keep things from getting out of hand, I’ve separated my remaining New York updates into two posts: one focusing on Donald Trump, the other on Bernie Sanders.
Sunday and Monday of last week was spent deep in the heart of Trump Country: I attended a Trump rally in Rochester at JetSmart Aviation, then went to another rally of his at the Times Union Center in Albany, the latter with William Rome.
The Rochester rally was absolutely packed, a far cry from the tiny crowd that turned out for Trump in Milwaukee. At least 15,000 people showed with, with thousands more turned away due to insufficient capacity. The Donald was introduced by Pastor Mark Burns, who fired up the crowd preacher-style with exhortations of Trump’s virtue and the perfidy of his opponents.
Trump came on not long after, though we unfortunately didn’t get to see him descending from the cockpit of his private jet. Beyond being a larger crowd then in Wisconsin, the people were insanely high-energy. For example, whenever Trump mentioned Ted Cruz and his “New York values” insult, the crowd would erupt into jeers of “LYIN’ TED! LYIN’ TED!”
There were only a handful of protesters inside the rally—about half a dozen—and about 100-150 outside. Amusingly, the police made them stand on the side of the road that was dissolving into a mud-and-dog-shit soup, making them look even scruffier and smell even worse than they ordinarily do.
The next day, I drove to Albany and met William Rome for the Trump rally there. The crowd was even bigger—20,000 at least, most likely more—and the rally was emceed by 2010 GOP gubernatorial nominee Carl Paladino, who got screwed over by the establishment in the same way that Trump is getting screwed over now.
The mood at this rally was absolutely electric. Even Trump himself seemed pissed off about how Cruz was stealing delegates and doing an end-run around the democratic process.
There were only about a hundred protesters, and they were incredibly demoralized, not the least by the “free speech zone” that the police had hemmed them into.
I wrap-up both rallies in this video:
My written account of what happened will be up at Right On soon.
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