Critics, supporters prepare for President Trump's Bay Area campaign stop

Amanda del Castillo Image
Tuesday, September 17, 2019
Critics, supporters prepare for President Trump's Bay Area campaign stop
Come 10 a.m., hundreds are expected to meet at Lincoln Park in Los Altos. The groups involved in organizing the effort are preparing to protest the president's visit with very visual aids.

SAN JOSE, Calif. (KGO) -- President Donald Trump and his campaign team will be back in the Bay Area Tuesday morning, for a busy day of fundraising.

Due to security reasons and anticipated resistance, the Secret Service is not releasing an exact location of the event. However, ABC News sources say all signs point to Silicon Valley.

RELATED: President Trump expected in Bay Area tomorrow

Come 10 a.m., hundreds are expected to meet at Lincoln Park in Los Altos. The groups involved in organizing the effort are preparing to protest the president's visit with very visual aids.

When Air Force One touches down at Moffett Field in the morning, "Chicken Trump" and "Baby Trump" inflatables will be rising to the occasion.

The group, Vigil for Democracy will start at Lincoln Park. They'll deploy protesters out to the president's fund-raising event wherever it pops up.

"This is a central location," Vara Ramakarishnan with Vigil for Democracy said about Lincoln Park. "It'll be a quick 10-minute drive to go there and protest where Trump is raising a lot of money."

Quite a bit of money is being raised on both sides. The Backbone Campaign behind "Baby Trump" collected $2,500 to fund the balloon's flight from the Embarcadero in San Francisco beginning at 11 a.m.

"Our expectation is we will deploy Baby Trump in San Francisco itself to counter the words of Ben Carson," Alan Marling with Resistance SF and the Backbone Campaign told ABC7 News.

Their demonstration will continue, despite an FAA issued flight restriction.

"We see this as an attack on our rights to protest and unconstitutional," Marling said. "So we will be inflating Baby Trump anyways."

This is President Trump's first return to the region since taking office. During his last visit in June 2016, some of his supporters were attacked by demonstrators at a rally in San Jose.

Months before, in April, then-Candidate Trump stopped his motorcade on Highway 101 and then jumped over a median to access the Hyatt hotel in Burlingame.

"Some people on the left have proven that they are not willing to let people gather peacefully, and hear the candidate of their choice," Santa Clara Co. Republic Party spokesperson, Shane Patrick Connelly said. "That they will attack them physically, and we don't want to see a repeat of that."

"It's the introverts like me, and the moms, the grandmothers," Vigil for Democracy's Ramakarishnan said about the planned protest. "It's not violent. We want peace."

She continued, "We don't mind differences, that's how democracy functions. We don't want consensus. We want cooperation. That's not what we're getting from Trump."

Over the phone, Republican National Committeewoman Harmeet Dhillon said there is a tremendous amount of Bay Area support for President Trump.

"It'll just be a ray of sunshine for those of us who seem to have been forgotten by the tide of optimism that we get from the rest of the country," she explained. "So, I think it's going to be a 100% amazing event."

The president is expected to be in the Bay Area for three hours before heading to Southern California.

Tickets for lunch with the president range from $1,000 to $100,000 apiece.

"I could've sold several, many tables more than what I did," Dhillon said. "We've had to turn a lot of people away. So, it was very easy to sell out this event and the other three events happening in Southern California as well."

Dhillon said she expects Mr. Trump to wow the crowd.

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