Washington Post – Many of President Trump’s most dedicated supporters — the sort who waited for hours in the Florida sun this weekend for his first post-inauguration campaign rally — say their lives changed on election night. Suddenly they felt like their views were actually respected and in the majority.
But less than one month into Trump’s term, many of his supporters say they once again feel under attack — perhaps even more so than before.
Those who journeyed to Trump’s Saturday evening event on Florida’s Space Coast said that since the election, they have unfriended some of their liberal relatives or friends on Facebook. They don’t understand why major media outlets don’t see the same successful administration they have been cheering on. And they’re increasingly frustrated that Democrats — and some Republicans — are too slow to approve some of the president’s nominees and too quick to protest his every utterance.
“They’re stonewalling everything that he’s doing because they’re just being babies about it,” said Patricia Melani, 56, a Jersey native who now lives here and attended her third Trump rally Saturday. “All the loudmouths? They need to let it go. Let it go. Shut their mouths and let the man do what he’s got to do. We all shut our mouths when Obama got in the second time around, okay? So that’s what really needs to be done.”
She blames the media for circulating “fake” stories about the president — like when she believed he was “very cool, wasn’t yelling” at a Thursday news conference, yet a CNN anchor described his behavior as “unhinged.”
“There’s such hatred for the man,” she said. “I just don’t get it.”
It was a common sentiment at the rally in an airplane hangar here, flanked by Air Force One and attended by about 9,000 people. There were chants of “CNN sucks!” and “Tell the truth!” A pre-rally speaker gleefully announced that the president had given the media “a spanking.”
[Priebus said Trump meant it when he called the press ‘the enemy of the American people!”]
Rally attendees panned coverage of the chaos within his administration, the cost of security for his family and the president’s now-halted executive order that briefly banned refugees and residents of seven Muslim-majority countries. Many acknowledged that the president’s first month could have been smoother, especially with the rollout of the travel ban, but they said the media has overblown those hiccups — and they’re glad to see the president fight back and label the media on Twitter Friday as “the enemy of the American People!”
“It was hilarious to see him give it to the media,” said Tony Lopez, 28, a car dealer who drove to the rally from Orlando. “The media’s problem is that they keep wanting to make up stories so that he looks bad. It doesn’t work. He’s talking right through you guys.”
Several people said they would have liked to see more coverage of a measure that Trump signed Thursday that rolled back a last-minute Obama regulation that would have restricted coal mines from dumping debris in nearby streams. At the signing, Trump was joined by coal miners in hard hats.
“If he hadn’t gotten into office, 70,000 miners would have been put out of work,” Patricia Nana, a 42-year-old naturalized citizen from Cameroon. “I saw the ceremony where he signed that bill, giving them their jobs back, and he had miners with their hard hats and everything — you could see how happy they were.”
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