Tasting victory, Trump becomes pugnacious
Donald Trump’s statement that he would like to punch a heckler in the face would have brought any other White House hopeful’s campaign to an abrupt halt.
|||Las Vegas - He is his party's clear front-runner, and was on course to win last night's Nevada caucuses. He is ahead in nine of the next 14 states due to vote on the Republicans' candidate for the White House in November. But Donald Trump was not yet ready to relax.
“I'd like to punch him in the face,” he said of a heckler at a rally in Las Vegas just hours before voters began the process of deciding who to back as the party's nominee in Nevada. In any other election, such an outburst might have brought the candidate's campaign to an ignominious end, but at Mr Trump's event it drew only laughter. The rally at the South Point Arena attracted a capacity crowd of around 8 000, and was touted as the biggest political gathering in Nevada history.
Mr Trump's belligerent rhetoric has in recent days been directed largely at his conservative rival, the Texas Senator Ted Cruz. Mr Cruz's campaign made a mistake on Sunday, when spokesman Rick Tyler tweeted a video of Marco Rubio apparently mocking the Bible.
The video turned out to be false, and on Monday Mr Cruz demanded Mr Tyler's resignation. Yet his dismissal has done little to dissuade Mr Trump from depicting the Texas Senator as a slippery customer. “Cruz lies more than any human being I've ever dealt with... [He's] sick,” Mr Trump said at his rally.
Mr Trump's supporters were invigorated by what they saw as his straight-talking approach. Corrections officer Erika von Tagen, 30, said his pugnacity was precisely his appeal. “We need to be strong in the eyes of our enemies,” she said. “He's a good face for this nation.”
Retired stockbroker Joe Russi, 52, said he backed Mr Trump mostly for his business credentials. “It's not Democrats and Republicans any more, it's businessmen and socialists,” he said. “We need someone who can handle the country and the debt we have, as a businessman.”
Appearing in Las Vegas on Tuesday, the Florida Senator Marco Rubio claimed he was the sole candidate capable of uniting Republicans to beat Hillary Clinton. “It can't just be about electing the loudest person in the room,” he insisted. But in Nevada neither he nor Mr Cruz drew crowds half as large as the front-runner.
Mr Rubio spent part of his childhood in Las Vegas, where his father worked as a barman and his mother as a hotel maid. Portraying himself as a champion of the city's low-income workers, Mr Rubio promised to spread the conservative message “to people who are living the way I grew up”.
Yet immigrant workers are unlikely to be significant voters at the GOP caucuses. Indeed, the crowds at the three major candidates' Las Vegas events were overwhelmingly white.
The Independent
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