Nearly seven thousand people turned out to see Donald Trump inside an old Air Force hangar here in western New York, despite getting less than 24 hours notice that the GOP frontrunner was coming here.
By the time the GOP frontrunner finally took the stage an hour behind schedule the cavernous room filled to its back wall. Reverberating roars rose up as Trump began to speak, stoking the crowd’s anger by citing statistics detailing the region’s economic decline, blasting the RNC for a “rigged” nomination process and taking aim at his usual foils: Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney and Ted Cruz. Here in the town where Francis Bellamy, author of the Pledge of Allegiance, lived and is buried, Trump stood below a giant American flag and promised to make the country great again.
“TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP!” the crowd screamed.
Amidst a campaign conversation in the run-up to next Tuesday’s primary focused on the notion of Trump’s “New York values,” the supposed liberalism of a long-time Manhattan resident, it is the mogul’s strong appeal upstate to veterans and white working class voters that would seem to explain his commanding lead in his home state.
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