Protesters block road to Trump rally
PHOENIX, Arizona—Protesters blocked a main highway leading into the Phoenix suburb where Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump staged a campaign rally on Saturday just days ahead of the Arizona primary.
Tempers flared at the rally itself, but without the violence that marred Trump’s event in Chicago a week earlier. He never goaded the protesters as he usually does at campaign events.
For hours, about two dozen protesters parked their cars in the middle of the main road to the event, unfurling banners reading “Dump Trump” and “Must Stop Trump,” and chanting “Trump is hate.” Traffic was backed up for several kilometers, with drivers honking in fury.
The road was eventually cleared and protesters marched down the highway to the rally site, weaving between Trump supporters who booed and jeered them.
Later Saturday in Tucson, Arizona, dozens of protesters made their way into another Trump rally and interrupted Trump as he spoke. In typical form, Trump had the protesters kicked out, but he urged the crowd of about 1,000 people to be nice to them.
“You don’t see me at Bernie’s disrupting their crowd,” Trump said, referring to Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders, who was campaigning on the Arizona-Mexico border on Saturday. “I give them respect.”
Several thousand miles away in New York, demonstrators also took to the streets to protest the Republican presidential hopeful, marching with a heavy police presence to Trump Tower, the Fifth Avenue skyscraper where Trump lives.
Demonstrators chanted: “Donald Trump, go away, racist, sexist, antigay.”
Winner take all
Trump was in Arizona to campaign ahead of Tuesday’s primary in which the winner will take all 58 delegates at stake. Polls show Trump leading his rivals in Arizona, a border state where Trump’s hardline on immigration has drawn support from Republican voters.
Trump was introduced at the rally by Joe Arpaio, the toughtalking sheriff of Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix and nearly two-thirds of Arizona’s population.
Arpaio has supported harsh measures to deal with immigrants living illegally in the Unit- ed States. He has forced inmates to wear pink underwear and live outside in tents as temperatures rose 38 degrees Celsius.
Trump’s main rivals, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, are desperately trying to prevent the real estate mogul from accumulating the 1,237 delegates needed to secure the nomination at the party’s national convention in July.
Cruz and Kasich are hoping for a contested convention in which delegates would be freed to turn from Trump if he fails to win a majority on the first ballot.