Massive Crowd Turns Out for Trump Rally in St. Cloud
ST. CLOUD (WJON News) -- Former President Donald Trump brought his campaign rally to St. Cloud on Saturday night.
He and his running mate JD Vance energized a huge crowd of supporters, many of whom stood outside in 90-degree heat for several hours just to get inside the National Hockey Center at St. Cloud State University.
The State Fire Marshal says emergency responders had to deal with heat exhaustion issues throughout the day.
Vance spoke for about a half hour and Trump was on stage for over an hour-and-a-half. They spoke on similar themes of deportation, funding police, and repeated jabs of fake news and the crooked media. He also devoted much of his time talking about Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Trump repeated himself a lot throughout his speech, touching on the same topics several times.
Toward the end of his speech, Trump talked more specifically about what he'd like to accomplish with a second term in office including building an iron dome over the United States, no tax on tips, a Reciprocal Trade Act, and a mandatory one-year in jail for burning the American flag.
Some of the speakers earlier in the rally included State Representatives Lisa Demuth and Bernie Perryman, along with Sixth District Congressman Tom Emmer. Earlier this year Emmer lost out on his chance to become the next Speaker of the House when he lost the support of Trump.
The National Hockey Center was set up with about 8,000 seats, but with standing-room-only spots filled as well, there were close to 9,000 people inside the arena. During his speech, the large screen TVs cut away to a massive crowd standing outside the arena watching on big screen TVs as well.
Several of the people we talked to were from central Minnesota, with a few traveling to St. Cloud from other states. Some were seeing Trump in person for the first time while others said they had seen him a handful of times.
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