Protesters briefly crash Grand Hyatt hotel in Manhattan where Trump stood out among the candidates for his take on Ted Cruz’s least favorite belief system

On the streets of Manhattan, hundreds of people raised colorful banners, chanted for fair wages and beat orange effigies of a certain Republican candidate for president.

But just a few hundred feet away at the Grand Hyatt hotel in midtown New York, a room full of 800 Republicans dined on chocolate elephants amid fur coats and tuxedos, separated from the street by steel and dozens of security agents. They had gathered at the New York Republican state committee’s annual gala to listen to what the three leading candidates for their party’s nomination for president had to say about New York values for $1,000 a seat.

The competing sets of those values briefly collided on Thursday night when a band of protesters snuck into the luxury hotel despite heavy security. Around a dozen demonstrators burst on to a lobby balcony chanting “presente” for all the people they claimed to represent: black Americans, Latino Americans and gay Americans whom they said Republicans persecute.

Pushing their way past reporters, they slung a banner against “the party of hate” over the lobby, one black man leaning precariously over the balcony. Within minutes, secret service agents, there to provide security for Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and John Kasich, raced out of the elevators behind them, grabbing the banners through the crush of bodies.

The agents encircled the protesters and swept them out away from the press. Later, the finance chairman for the state party said 10 people were arrested, though the NYPD declined to confirm the number before the event had ended.

All three candidates spoke at the gala, intended to raise funds for the state’s Republican party. Inside the glitzy Hyatt ballroom, after a rendition of the national anthem was sung by three women dressed as sailors, Republican frontrunner Trump told the wealthy Republican audience what he thought of the huge protests outside. “These are paid protesters, folks, they’ve got the most beautiful signs.”

“If they’re real” and not “crap”, he said, “we want those signs made in the basement”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A supporter of Donald Trump fights with protesters demonstrating in midtown Manhattan. Photograph: Mike Segar/Reuters

But Trump’s true theme, shared with the GOP crowd, was one incidentally echoed by Thursday’s protesters. “What are New York values?” he asked the crowd, alluding to Cruz’s vague denigration of those “liberal” values in a January debate.

His speech began with a ramble through Manhattan geography, followed by a tutorial on ice skating rinks: “You want rubber hose, and you want water, and in the water you want salt so it doesn’t freeze.”

Then he described his idea of New York values: policemen and firefighters; transit workers who “keep those trains and buses going and everything else”; families in Central Park, “some together, some not”. Honesty and strength. Family and work ethic. “Big energy. If Jeb Bush came here, I’m telling you he’d have much more energy than he does now.”

He also invoked the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. “In our darkest moment as a city we showed the world the very, very best,” he said. “We have a city that’s going to outlast us, it’s one of the great, great cities of the world, and it’s called New York City.”

While the donors whooped and clapped, protesters on the street strung profanities next to Trump’s name. A white man and an African American woman got into a brief altercation over politics, and officers loaded a handful of protesters into an NYPD van, placing their belongings into plastic bags one by one.

Earlier in the day, protesters were joined in Times Square by Governor Andrew Cuomo, who defined another version of New York values. Trump and Cruz, according to Cuomo, argue “people with different languages, different skin colors, different religions, different sexual orientations, they’re the problem”.

“You can’t do that in New York. That won’t sell in New York,” he went on. “Don’t try to make diversity an enemy because we celebrate diversity. We love that we are black and brown and white. We love that we are African American and Latino. That’s who we are and that’s not going to work here. That’s our strength, not a weakness.”

The Democrat said that he had heard New Yorkers’ call: “Working families have been going backwards for decades. The distribution of wealth is not fair in this country.”

He suggested that New York values meant the right to a $15 minimum wage that he had signed into law earlier this month, a theme Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, who were debating one another across the east river in Brooklyn, sparred over in a heated exchange.



Jumal Tarver, 37, had spent the day on the streets calling for higher wages and the right to unionize. “I definitely think that [Republicans] want the wages to stay the same as they are or be even lower,” he told the Guardian.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jumal Tarver, who protested the Republican gala, believed the Republicans wanted to keep pay for low-wage workers depressed. Photograph: Jana Kasperkevic for the Guardian

Tarver, a father of a 13-month-old and a seven-year-old, earns $10.50 an hour at a McDonald’s in the city. He had a message for Trump and his many outrageous and contradictory claims: “If you don’t stand for something, you fall for anything.”

Inside the hotel ballroom, Ted Cruz did not mention the New York values that he had previously derided on the campaign trail. “New York City is hallowed ground. It is the site of the worst terrorist attack on United States soil,” he said.

But Cruz mostly spun a stump speech, warning about dangers to religious freedom and gun rights and his commitment to Israel, killing terrorists and abolishing the IRS. He boasted about his recent victories in Colorado and Wisconsin over Donald Trump, and the crowd clapped politely.

The value he asked for from the crowd of veteran donors and politicians was reconciliation within a bitterly divided party: “We either unify or we die.”

The audience clapped politely again, their opinion expressed through muted applause. The party’s financial chair even thanked “Ted Bush” for his speech.

At Grand Central station, next door to the luxury hotel, less affluent New Yorkers had their own values to express, namely impatience. During the heat of the protests, unhappy commuters complained “What the hell are they protesting now?” at the march of protesters, and another shouted “C’mon, people gotta get home!”

By the dinner’s end, the protesters and commuters were long gone. Only the barricades and police still lined 42nd Street, near an abandoned hand-made sign, possibly crafted in a basement: “Make America Hate Again”.

