Donald Trump on Wednesday lamented the murder of nearly 50 people in an Orlando nightclub this past weekend, said America's gay community supports him and used the tragedy to continue his call for a ban on immigrants from Muslim countries with ties to terrorism.
It was a careful path the presumptive Republican presidential nominee chose while speaking to a packed house in Atlanta's iconic Fox Theatre. He both used it to reach out to the LGBT community yet also to again call for a stronger U.S. policy against an influx of immigrants from Syria and other Muslim countries known to harbor terrorists.
Meanwhile, more than 100 protesters gathered outside the Fox to decry Trump as an “unhinged” racist. At least three were arrested.
Initially, protesters were separated from police by Peachtree Street as they danced, sang and chanted on the sidewalk opposite the theater. At 12:50 p.m., they stormed the street, shouting, “The people united will never be defeated,” and stalling traffic.
Inside the theater, close to a dozen protesters were escorted out by security after attempts to disrupt Trump’s speech. But the business mogul has grown used to the interruptions and hardly stopped as his supporters drowned out the protests. At times it was difficult to tell whether a shouted voice was a protester or a supporter. Many regularly hollered toward the stage lines of solidarity — including attacks on the presumptive Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton — such as “Hillary for prison!”
The crowd inside the theater, ironically designed to resemble a Muslim mosque, was largely white, although it showed signs of age and gender diversity. Race never seemed far from the minds of many in the audience and on the stage. Before Trump spoke, several Georgia Republicans took the stage to fire up the crowd, including two key members of the party’s minority outreach team: Vivian Childs and Leo Smith.
None, however, thrilled the crowd more than a surprise guest who joined Trump on stage. Former University of Georgia football coach Vince Dooley was met with a chorus of dog barks as he endorsed Trump for president.
“You’re’ the one who’s going to make America great again,” Dooley said in a hoarse voice. “God bless America, God bless Donald. The people have spoken.”
Dooley, who earlier endorsed former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush for the Republican nomination, joins former UGA great Herschel Walker on Team Trump.
Before the event began, Benjamin Moore of Atlanta, who is black, sat quietly in an aisle seat waiting. Several white men approached him one at a time to shake his hand and ask whether he planned to cause trouble, apparently wondering whether he was a Trump supporter or a protester waiting to strike.
“I just came to see Trump speak,” Moore said in an interview.
Moore said the questions about his intentions were “annoying.”
“I guess I understand with the stuff that happened in the past. You have to be extra careful,” Moore said. “I don’t like it, but I understand.”
Once, Trump stopped to ask whether a person shouting was “friend or foe?” When the crowd responded “Foe!” Trump pounced: “Oh he’s foe, get him the hell out of here. Don’t hurt him. We’ve got to love everybody.”
Candice Hearn of Stone Mountain was among those friends in the audience Wednesday. She said she believes Trump is the best hope of keeping America safe.
“I like America first,” Hearn said. “I like his stance on security of the country and getting out of the way of business.”
Back on topic, Trump said the Orlando massacre, carried out by an American-born Muslim man, was “unthinkable.”
“And when you listen to the stories of what took place and the laughter as this man was shooting incredible people,” he said, “how can this possibly be happening in the United States of America?”
He then gave his answer to attacks: “We have to be tough. And we have to be smart. We have to be vigilant. We have to have people report other people when that happens.”
His remarks Wednesday came as Democrats and some Republicans criticized Trump's earlier reactions to the shootings, in which he questioned whether President Barack Obama "doesn't want" to fight terrorism for some "ulterior motive."
Still, in Atlanta, Trump said incidents like the one in Orlando are “going to happen again and again and again because we’re not doing what we’re supposed to be doing.”
“We are taking in thousands of people into our country,” Trump said. “We have no idea where they come from. We have no idea who the hell they are. We know they believe in certain things that we don’t want to believe in.”
Trump told an applauding crowd that his plan is to stop “on a temporary basis” allowing people “from pouring into our country until we find out what the hell is going on.”
The U.S. should welcome “people in that cherish us, that want to love us, that want to do things that won’t destroy us, that won’t go to a club where you have innocent people and where you have no guns on the other side … and, by the way, I’m going to save your Second Amendment,” he said to huge applause.
All his rhetoric, he said, has been welcomed by the LGBT community.
“The LGBT community, the gay community, are so much in favor of what I’ve been talking about,” he said and further touted his record on gay rights by recalling how he opened the doors to his Palm Beach, Fla., country club to everyone.
“A member of the club, a great guy, who’s gay, wrote a letter saying what Donald Trump did nobody else would do,” Trump said.
Not all were willing to praise Trump’s record on LGBT issues.
“Donald Trump’s attack on Muslims is intended to divide us,” said Jay Brown, the communications director of the Human Rights Campaign. “The person who committed this heinous act of violence (in Orlando) was an American citizen conditioned to hate and to believe that LGBTQ people deserved to be massacred.”
Trump, he said, “is no friend of the LGBTQ community” because he has “vowed to roll back marriage equality, pass Kim Davis-style discrimination and allow governors from coast to coast to pass laws like North Carolina’s HB2.”
“Trump’s rhetoric today isn’t fooling anyone, and what he is peddling isn’t protection,” Brown said. “It’s poison.”
Similar sentiments were shared outside the Fox.
State Democratic Party officials spoke around 10 a.m. and called Trump “unhinged.”
“Donald Trump is a clear and present danger to the nation’s security,” Party Chairman DuBose Porter said. “He’s temperamentally unfit to serve as commander and chief.”
The first protester to be arrested was Sir Maejor, the president of Black Lives Matter Greater Atlanta. Maejor got into a short fight with another protester who had been chanting “All Lives Matter” into a megaphone while others tried to drown him out by chanting “Black Lives Matter.”
Throughout the protest, which ended around 2:30 p.m., Trump supporters and protesters only clashed a handful of times. Those meetings inspired heated debates on civil rights, foreign policy and controversial Trump statements, but they never escalated beyond that.
There were also positive interactions. As protesters sat and prayed or meditated, one Trump supporter even joined them and remained with the crowd until the protest ended.
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