Remember those innocent times when Donald Trump telling African-American voters they're all so down and out that they have nothing to lose by voting for him seemed shocking?
When was that? Last week?
Fast forward a few days to Trump's rally at the Florida State Fairgrounds in Tampa Wednesday, where he reiterated those comments as he urged minorities to vote for him.
"What do you have to lose? What do you have to lose?" he said. "It can not get any worse. And, believe me, I am going to fix it. I am going to make it so good.”
He blamed President Obama and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, as well as Democrats as a whole, for crime and poverty in major cities — an oft-spouted GOP claim (hey, what about poverty, crime and meth in states with Republican governors? Hey, where's everyone going?) — and said he's the guy who will make it all better.
“I say to the African-American vote — great people — to the Hispanic vote, who have been absolutely treated terrible, I say, what do you have to lose? I will fix it," he said. “I will fix it. I'll be able to make sure that when you walk down the street in the inner city or wherever you are you're not going to be shot. Your child is not going to be shot.”
The crowd was totally into it.
Know what the crowd was not? Diverse.
There was more diversity among the guys outside selling "Trump that Bitch" T-shirts then there was in the audience of more than 3,000 supporters. We spotted, at most, five non-white people, meaning the average skin tone in the room (minus Trump, of course) was pallid ecru at best. (Although that's supposed to change in the coming weeks.)
And while the front half of the room was pretty packed with very enthused supporters chanting "build that wall!" seemingly on cue, and despite his outright assertion that Wednesday's rally had record attendance, past rallies dwarfed the crowd size. When he spoke at USF in February, he drew well over 10,000 (granted, that was a Friday night). Hell, when Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders spoke in an adjacent room in March a few days before facing off with Clinton in Florida's presidential preference primary, he had the much bigger room, expansive risers and all, near capacity.
The rest of Trump's speech bounced around on the usual suspects: jobs, NAFTA, the Transpacific Partnership, the "inclusive" nature of his campaign, expansion of the U.S. military and, of course, Public Enemy Number One at these sorts of events, Clinton, whom he said was guilty of all the things, namely the controversy over Clinton's deleted emails. He had a bit of an oops when talking about them, one that delighted the crowd.
"Hillary Clinton created an illegal private email server, deliberately and willfull, and with total premedication," he said, and the crowd laughed before he corrected himself. "Premeditation… Could be the first one was right, actually. You know? …Premedication, I think I like it."
[Crowd roars.]
(Note: When we first attempted to type the word "private" in the above quote, we accidentally began to type "primate." Primate? We think we like it.)
Ahead of his nearly hour-long speech, several Republican luminaries warmed up the crowd, including Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, Congressional candidate Christine Quinn — a long-shot Republican challenger to Tampa Democratic Congresswoman Kathy Castor — and Hillsborough County Commissioner Al Higginbotham, a former backer of Jeb Bush's presidential candidacy.
Giuliani spent much of his time at the podium trashing Clinton per the standard. He said the right's nebulous charges against Clinton, namely the Clinton Foundation/State Department controversy, will end up being worse than Watergate, possibly as bad as (yikes!) the Teapot Dome scandal of the early 1920s.
Bondi lauded Trump's law and order "cred" and said a vote for Trump guarantees a conservative U.S. Supreme Court Justice will fill the seat Justice Antonin Scalia left open with his passing in February.
“We have no doubt in our minds that Donald Trump will put conservative justices on the United States Supreme Court who will follow the rule of law," she said. "And sadly we know exactly who Hillary Clinton will put on the Supreme Court, and I'm not even going to go there.”
Bondi, of course, was likely referring to Merrick Garland, that utterly liberal firebrand Obama nominee Senate Republicans are blocking (j.k, dude's a moderate).
“That man has a special meaning to me and my family and I've stuck with him,” Higginbotham said of Bush. “But today we have a nominee for the the Republican Party.”
Though the rally didn't start till well after noon (and Trump didn't approach the podium until about two), fans began to line up outside the venue hours before.
"Hillary's a bitch," he said.
Another Trump supporter, a Desert Storm vet who no longer has the use of his legs, stood on the perimeter of an anti-Trump protest in a "free-speech zone" on the edge of the fairgrounds. He said he think's Trump's worth a shot when it comes to reforming the U.S. Department of Veterans' Affairs alone.
“They're overworked, understaffed and the bureaucracy is bloated with high-dollar people who don't have a clue what's going on on the floor,” said Jeff Branem of Valrico. “Under Clinton I absolutely think it's going to be worse. I think under Trump we really have a shot. We have a shot at getting some reform, getting the help that we need.”
The protest he was observing was something of a press conference comprising local religious and social justice leaders, including Orlando imam Abdurrahman Sykes.
“In the increasing velocity of Mr. Trump's ban on Muslims are the reverberations of the 1933 Nazi propaganda. As an imam in the great city beautiful Orlando, we've had shootings in the homes of Muslims. The [community center] that I've been a member of was closed twice last month due to hate crimes," he said. “Mr. Trump's prejudice is borne out in the direct article, 'the.' The Muslims. The blacks. The hispanics. This kind of division and exclusion is against the American value of quality for all.”
Daniel Barajas of the pro-comprehensive immigration reform group Young American Dreamers said that if an elementary school kid were to utter some of the things Trump has said, he or she could get expelled, and railed against the notion that having "nothing to lose" is reason to vote for someone.
“It's not about what more do you have to lose than what makes you worthy of our vote," he said. "It's about how you plan to lead us as the beacon of light of democracy across the nation, across the world, the global leaders of the cultural mixing pot. Yes, it's impressive that somebody who preaches so much division could actually think they can lead us as one nation.”
Check out video of the event:
This article appears in Aug 18-25, 2016.
