Lotton joins fellow delegates in voting for Trump

Havreite and Montana delegate Brad Lotton was among those at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland Tuesday who cast the votes that officially made Donald Trump the party’s nominee for president.

All of Montana’s 27 delegates voted for Trump in accordance with the June 8 primary results.

In a Facebook comment, Hill County Republican Treasurer Barb Salerno said she had seen Lotton on TV when Montana had cast its votes.

The move came after a raucous first day, where a faction of anti-Trump delegates tried to force a vote on a rules change that would have denied the outspoken billionaire-turned-insurgent politician the nomination. It also helped divert attention from allegations that dogged the campaign that portions of the speech Trump’s wife, Melania Trump, had given the night before had been copied from Michelle Obama’s 2008 speech to the Democratic National Convention.

Earlier in the day, Lotton left the confines of the Quicken Loan Arena where the convention was being held for the Progressive Field, where delegates from each of the 50 states posed for their official convention photo. Lotton said on the Hill County GOP Facebook group that the picture of the Treasure State’s 27-member delegation was taken after that of the Arkansas delegation.

Lotton attended a lunch for both the Montana and Ohio delegations hosted by Anheuser-Busch in downtown Cleveland.

“If I still drank, I could have made a serious dent in their budget,” Lotton wrote in a post on the Hill County GOP Facebook page.

When he was out, Lotton said, he and other delegates saw a contingent of Black Lives Matter protesters. He said the demonstrations were nonviolent, “just loud and obnoxious.”

Lotton said once they had passed, a young woman approached the delegates and apologized. The woman, who was African-American, said nobody she knows subscribes to the beliefs of the protesters.

“Truthfully, this is the first protest we have seen.” he said. “It appears that the press is falsely empowering this discontent.”

Lotton also came across some old friends from the Hi-Line who now live in other states.

One of those familiar faces was Bruce Thompson, now a state senator from Georgia, who Lotton said had gone to school in Big Sandy.

He said Thompson remembers Lotton’s mother as one of his grade school teachers.

Montana Sen. Steve Daines showed up at the convention Tuesday where he appeared with other freshman senators to tout the diverse backgrounds of the newest members of the Senate Republican caucus.

Daines was elected in 2014 to the U.S. Senate.