Trump charms supportive Rochester crowd

A packed and sweltering crowd at the Rochester Athletic Arena greet Donald Trump as he enters the gym Thursday night. (Lebanon Voice/Harrison Thorp photo)

ROCHESTER - Sales people preach if you can show you're sincere, that's 99 percent of making the sale.

Well, Republican frontrunner Donald Trump showed sincerity, poise, and, yes, humility in front of a packed house of nearly 3,000 supporters at a sweltering Rochester Athletic Arena on Thursday.

"I don't believe in global warming, but maybe tonight I do," he quipped. "I don't think this place's air conditioning is keeping up with the heat."

Trump, changing his normal stump speech to a Q&A, took about 15 questions from the audience during a lively, free flowing hourlong town-hall style session.

During the give and take his support for the military and the nation's veterans loomed large as he rapped the Obama administration for letting our fighting force grow week and our veterans suffer with inferior treatment and medical care.

"Obama doesn't love this country, he doesn't even like it," Trump said.

He said the nation is not seen as a first-rate power anymore and said the country's trade deficit is shameful.

"We have a $400 billion trade deficit with China and a $170 billion trade deficit with Japan," he said. "That's got to end."

GOP frontrunner Donald Trump points to a questioner during Thursday night's town hall style event. (DanTuohy/Union Leader)

He said he wanted to bring manufacturing jobs lost to those countries back to America to give more people jobs and increase the standard of living.

"For the first time in America's history, we can't say to our children and grandchildren that we're going to leave them with a better life," he said. "I'll change that."

He said he hates the NAFTA deal and said it continues to hemorrhage jobs and wages to countries like Mexico."

"You like Oreo cookies?" he asked one questioner. "Well they recently said they're going to be making them in Mexico.

Trump said the trade deficit with Mexico has grown to $40 billion and he'd leverage some of that to convince their leaders to pay for building the wall. (One audience member referred to it as the Trump Wall drawing a laugh from Trump, himself.)

Trump got one of the biggest ovations of the night when he said, "China built a 13,000-mile wall 2,000 years ago. Why can't we build a 2,000-mile wall today, and we'll have a nice big door on it too for legal immigration."

He said illegal immigration was costing taxpayers a lot, maybe as much as $200 billion annually.

One audience member's story crystallized the problem. She said her parents had moved from Germany during the Berlin airlift in the 1960s. She said her parents got jobs and worked their fingers to the bone to make a life for her family.

"Now, they come over here and get housing and food stamps and housing and medical on my money," she said. "Is that fair?"

After the applause quieted, she continued her story about how she worked for Lucent (Lucent Technologies), a once-thriving company run by Carly Fiorina, one of Trump's rivals for the Republican nomination. The woman said when the company went belly-up during Fiorina's tenure, she lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in stock options she had planned to use for her retirement.

The opening allowed Trump to speak volumes of the ineptitude of Fiorina's leadership at Lucent and at Hewlett Packard, a company that fired her.

"She's a bad businesswoman, she did poorly at Lucent, she bought Compaq computers which was a bad deal and she did poorly at Hewlett Packard," he said obviously warming to the sound bite.

Trump held to his mantra of speaking in generalities about major topics, but did say that his team was working on a full tax overhaul that "the middle class will love," he said. He added that details of the plan will be released in two or three weeks.

In short, for a billionaire he came off as a pretty "regular guy," at one point turning to the bleachers behind him and saying, "OK, let's talk to these guys behind me. All they've seen of me is my hair."

While there was overwhelming support of Trump, there were a few hecklers and awkward moments.

One bearded man quoted scripture and cried that global warming was real. When he continued to shout, one of Trump's security people waded into the bleachers and warned him if he kept it up, he'd be asked to leave.

Another person asked Trump a question about global warming and he simply turned away and said, "Next question."

Another young woman asked Trump to help her with her nightmares. She softly said how she had nightmares about the assassination by ISIS of journalist James Foley of Rochester last year, about railcars full of prisoners and the Holocaust.

A nonplussed Trump went to the next questioner without comment.

For the overwhelming majority of the night, however, it was love and support.

After about 55 minutes, Trump took his last question, exhorting the questioner, "Please make it a good question or I'll have to take another."

Afterward he announced it was the end to a thunderous cheer and made his way to the inner hallway of the arena stopping often along the way to shake hands.

A few minutes later an eight-vehicle cavalcade complete with motorcycles exited the rear of the complex and headed north down Chestnut Hill Road.

The night was hailed by officials of the Strafford County Republican Party as the largest-ever political event held in the county.