Mitch Perry
The imagery coming out of California late last week wasn’t extremely alarming, but it was instructive. Protestors, many of them black or brown, went a bit nuts at Donald Trump campaign appearances Thursday night in Orange County on Thursday night and to a lesser extent on Friday in Burlingame, just south of San Francisco (and right near the airport).
It was similar to the sort of images we saw at an ill-fated Trump rally in Chicago last month when violent exchanges between protesters and supporters prompted The Donald to cancel an appearance.
Get prepared to see more of such activism as Trump continues to campaign in the Golden State over the next month.
The cable networks are trying to promote Indiana as the last effort for the #NeverTrump forces. In fact, the race is pretty much over by now. Indiana will just put an exclamation point on the Republican nomination. So how much campaigning will actually go on in California in advance of the June 7 primary is uncertain.
But the activism is just a precursor of what we’ll probably see in Cleveland in July.
Major protests at the political conventions took a hiatus four years ago, after the mass arrests that took place in St. Paul at the 2008 Republican National Convention. That so concerned folks in Tampa that the TPD and security forces put maximum effort into containing such protests in 2012, but the fact remains that activists (pretty much) boycotted Tampa and the DNC confab in Charlotte a week later.
That won’t be the case in Cleveland. Trump’s provocative statements on Muslims and Mexicans may seem dated to some, but not to a lot of folks who truly consider Trump to be a dangerous man and will be disruptive. Yes, Trump may end up “winning” the PR war against unruly protestors, but they won’t be going away.
Incidentally, the Wall Street Journal reports that Trump’s rallies and the protests around them are leaving some cities with huge security bills.
The Journal reports that on March, 15 Trump presidential campaign events cost local authorities more than $300,000 to secure and manage, local police departments and campaign venues. That’s an average of $20,000 in costs per event. Some event sites are billing the campaign for reimbursement, and some have gotten money back.
In other news …
On Friday, the Hillary Clinton campaign announced that Simone Ward, who led the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee over the past year, will he heading her campaign here in Florida.
Who is Tony Khoury, and why he is running for U.S. Senate. Some clues here.
Not that they were ever that close, but David Jolly and an arm of the Republican House caucus have completely ended their relationship. The NRCC called Jolly a liar and accused “60 Minutes” of bad journalism in airing a report on the Pinellas County Congressman’s Stop Act.
Sandy Murman says she believes a plan on transportation (without a sales tax) can still be cobbled together this year in Hillsborough County.
