Protesters mixed with supporters at Donald Trump's speech in Raleigh, North Carolina, on Friday night, interrupting him 10 times during an unusually short event.
The shouts began minutes after the GOP front-runner started speaking to the full-capacity crowd of nearly 8,000 people, with protesters chanting "Black Lives Matter" while others held signs saying things such as "Dump Trump" and "Stop the Hate, We Make America Great," reports
NBC News.
Supporters tried to cover up demonstrators with coats and signs, and even started shoving some of the protesters, but Trump used their appearance to speak out against an increasingly divided country.
"Look at what happens," he said. "Our country is so divided. There's hatred between people. We want to bring it together."
But the full event lasted less than an hour, which is unusual for Trump, who generally speaks for at least an hour. He took questions for nearly two hours this week in Manassas, Virginia.
Before he wrapped up the appearance, he answered a question from a pre-teen who said she was afraid about the state of the country, commenting that after the Sept. 11 attacks, the "animals that did that, they sent their wives and families back to Saudi Arabia. Those wives knew what their husbands were going to do. We never went after them, we never did anything. We have to attack much stronger."
And after the event, Hope Hicks, Trump's spokeswoman, told NBC News that Trump indeed would have wanted the attackers' family members captured.
Earlier this week, Trump came under fire after telling Fox News'
"Fox and Friends" that it's important not only to take out ISIS militants, but "you have to take out their families" as well.
"One of the problems that we have and one of the reasons we're so ineffective is they're trying to, they're using them as shields," the
GOP front-runner said.
On Friday, Trump also spoke about the San Bernardino shootings, saying he would handle such situations "so tough," and commenting that "if you had a couple of folks in there with guns, that knew how to use them, and they were in that room, you wouldn't have dead people. The dead people would be the other guys."
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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