Trump is holding a rally in Billings Thursday after giving a speech on energy policy in North Dakota.
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Throngs of people waved signs and wore caps emblazoned with the Trump campaign motto “Make America Great Again”.
Presumptive Republican Presidential Nominee Donald Trump made his first appearance in Montana since announcing his candidacy almost a year ago, and as of Friday, he has enough pledged delegates to clinch the GOP nomination at the party’s convention this July.
“The fact that he secured it today makes being here worthwhile”, said Darin Dupree, a 53-year-old convenience store worker and military veteran from Billings. “Donald Trump is not my first choice or even my second choice for president”, he said.
While Trump is the presumptive nominee, his name won’t be alone on the Republican presidential ballot in Montana’s June 7 primary.
Another Billings man, Bruce Bahm, says he spent the night in a folding chair in the arena’s parking lot to be first in line.
“I’ll do everything I can to get him elected”, Bahm said. He said Trump would best represent the silent majority and cited the vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court as a crucial issue that he didn’t want a Democrat to fill.
Trump said he’d won more votes than anyone in history in Republican primaries and that he’d built a political movement, which Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly had called “the single, greatest political phenomenon that he has ever seen in his lifetime”.
But in an email, a spokeswoman for the senator said there would be an announcement made at the Trump rally, but she did not elaborate.
He also pointed out Montana’s congressman, U.S. Rep. Ryan Zinke, as someone who was “with me right from the beginning”, although he said Zinke’s wife was the stronger supporter initially.
“Having an economy that moves is absolutely critical and to have someone understands what drives the economic, you know, engine of this country, I think it’s Donald Trump”.
Some Republicans kept their distance.
Trump made some brief Montana references – his son likes to hunt here, it’s “very much a Republican stronghold”, the state’s lovely scenery – but spent most of his speech talking about the national campaign, and recounting his string of primary election victories in the face of media predictions that he could not win the nomination.
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If Montana voters were to select a Democrat for president in November, it would break more than two decades of domination by Republican candidates.
