Donald Trump draws Florida faithful crowd

SUNRISE — The New York Daily News, stridently opposed to Donald Trump throughout his candidacy, printed a front-page editorial Wednesday calling on him to abandon his presidential bid.

Based on his appearance at the BB&T Center on Wednesday, Trump doesn’t read the New York Daily News. Nor do his supporters. Or, if they do, they don’t take its editorials to heart.

Trump spoke to a raucous crowd of Floridians, covering all the themes he’s focused on since his presidential bid began more than a year ago.

The campaign news du jour Wednesday centered on a comment Trump made a day earlier, when he was discussing the future of the Second Amendment in a Clinton presidency.

"Hillary wants to abolish — essentially abolish the Second Amendment. By the way, if she gets to pick, if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don't know," he said Tuesday.

Critics claim Trump's words advocated violence against Clinton. Trump later said he meant gun owners could exert political pressure to protect their rights. The New York paper’s editors said it was the last straw. “This isn’t a joke anymore,” their headline read.

The flap bothered the Trump faithful not one bit. Their anger, and the anger emanating from the podium, was directed at the media that seized upon the story.

“Look at the way they covered that story yesterday. Was that disgusting?" Trump asked the BB&T crowd. “The media is incredibly dishonest … almost as crooked as crooked Hillary Clinton,” he said to cheers.

In fact, dating back to at least the Republican National Convention in Cleveland last month, mocking, deriding and generally dismissing the media has been a staple of the Trump campaign.

And the more the media attack Trump, it seems, the more his most ardent supporters — like those who dodged afternoon thunderstorms to see him in Sunrise — love him.

Sharon Day, a Republican National Committee member from Florida, scolded the media, to the delight of the crowd, before Trump took the stage.

“Report the facts rather than just the talking points the Democrats give them,” she said.

YouTube star Lynette “Diamond” Hardaway was even more blunt. “We will not allow the media to keep feeding us a narrative full of lies.”

Trump used Wednesday’s appearance to try to refocus the narrative on another story in the news, the disclosure of emails showing contacts between the State Department and the Clinton Foundation while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state. Trump called it “pay for play” and suggested further revelations will hurt Clinton.

“Maybe there’s more to come,” Trump said.

After that, Trump launched into his trademark unscripted campaign pitch, moving from one topic to another — a wall at the southern border, better trade deals, repealing Obamacare, stopping Common Core, blocking immigration of unscreened immigrants from countries wracked by terrorism — all of them red meat for his fans.

Addressing the persistent plaint that his temperament is not suitable for the nation’s highest office, Trump turned the tables on Clinton.

“I don’t like her temperament. Her temperament is the temperament of a loser. We need a tough guy. My temperament is going to win for us folks,” Trump said. “They (terrorists) are chopping off heads and you don’t like my tone?”

Controversy seems to flow from Trump’s mouth with every ad lib speech on the campaign trail. As the Democratic National Convention came to a close, his response to Gold Star father Khizr Khan, a featured speaker on the event’s last evening, created a firestorm akin to the one arising from the Second Amendment remarks this week.

But his remarks don’t drive away his crowds. At the Sunrise rally, Gold Star mother Beth Agami from nearby Parkland was among the several thousand people who filed in to see Trump speak. The Khan controversy didn’t shake her confidence in Trump.

“I have mixed feelings about that,” she said. “His answer should have been, simply, he was sorry for their loss and left it at that. That’s not going to stop me from supporting him (Trump). The other side (Khan) had issues, too,” said Agami, whose son was killed while serving in the Army in Iraq in 2007.

Polls show Trump’s support slipping since the Republican convention, but you wouldn’t know it listening to the crowd at the BB&T Center on Wednesday.

They loved Trump and Trump loved them right back.

“I heard the most loyal people are the supporters of Trump, and I believe it,” he said.

The Trump campaign seemed to have a musical answer to the New York Daily News in its prelude to the Broward County rally: Through the PA system played The Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”

Connect with Brent Batten at brent.batten@naplesnews.com, on Twitter @NDN_BrentBatten and at facebook.com/ndnbrentbatten.