GOP frontrunner Donald Trump used the first visit to Maine of his presidential campaign to repeatedly attack fellow Republican and former presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who denounced him earlier in the day.
Trump’s Portland rally drew hundreds of supporters, and dozens of protesters, in anticipation of this weekend’s presidential caucuses.
Trump opponents, many of them Republicans, gathered in the morning at Portland’s Congress Square for a hastily planned rally next door to the Westin Hotel where Trump was scheduled to speak.
“I’m appalled by his behavior,” said Portland resident Leslie Pohl. “It’s just so rude and bullying and definitely not what a presidential candidate should embody.”
Inside the hotel, some 700 people packed a conference room. Trump was introduced by Maine Gov. Paul LePage, who recently called on fellow governors to oppose the billionaire’s insurgent campaign but endorsed him last week.
LePage took the opportunity to go after Democrat Bernie Sanders, who in a Portland appearance this week, called the governor out for “beating up on poor people.”
“Bernie Sanders said yesterday that I didn’t like poor people,” LePage said. “Let me tell you Bernie, if you’re listening, you put on my shoes for one day and tell me I don’t know what poverty is.”
Characterizing himself as anti-establishment, LePage said the same goes for Trump.
“But now the establishment is trying to defeat him,” LePage said. “Those who’ve been sitting on their hands are now saying, ‘You’re not going to be our president.’ Guess what? We’re going to prove them wrong. Even Mitt Romney is against Donald.”
Romney is the enemy of the day for Trump’s supporters. Earlier in the day Romney took the lead in the Stop Trump Movement by calling Trump “a fraud” who took the American people for suckers and who would lose to Democrat Hillary Clinton in the general election.
From the podium in Portland, Trump first called Romney irrelevant. But then he spent much of the rest of the speech bashing him.
“And I backed Mitt Romney,” Trump said. “I backed him. You can see how loyal he is. He was begging for my endorsement. I could have said, ‘Mitt, drop to your knees.’ He would have dropped to his knees. He was begging.”
Trump criticized Romney’s business acumen and his views on trade and belittled Romney for his loss to Barack Obama in 2012. Trump highlighted comments Romney made then about the 47 percent of Americans Romney said were dependent on government and so would vote only for Obama.
“He came up with the 47 percent, he demeaned 47 percent of the people in the country. The famous 47 percent,” Trump said. “Once that was said, I’ll be honest, once that was said a lot of people thought it was over for him. And then for the last month and a half he disappeared.”
Trump barely mentioned any of his actual opponents in the primary fights. Later in the day, former GOP presidential candidate and Arizona Sen. John McCain also joined Romney in a blistering critique of Trump.
But that’s seems unlikely to matter much for many of the voters attracted to Trump. Jarrod Reynolds of Portland said the party has moved far away from the concerns of ordinary voters, and the country’s politics needs radical change.
“I really like what he stands for, I really like the fact that he’s an honest man paying for his own campaign,” he said. “He tells it like it is. And I think he actually has the guts to really make change and make it fast, and we really need it fast. I mean Bernie Sanders has some great points and some great ideas. But his platform would take a decade or more to actually implement. We can’t wait that long for that sort of thing.”
Reynolds doesn’t have to wait long to take action himself. Maine Republicans hold their presidential caucus on Saturday.
