PHOENIX (AP) — Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump criticized U.S. immigration and trade policies on Saturday in speeches that veered from accusing Mexico of deliberately sending criminals across the border to professing respect for the Mexican government and love for its people. 
 
 Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump waves to the crowd as he arrives to speak at a rally before a crowd of 3,500 Saturday, July 11, 2015, in Phoenix. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin) (Associated Press) 
 
 Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks at FreedomFest, Saturday, July 11, 2015, in Las Vegas. Trump said his comments about immigration have become a movement and has pointed to violence... (Associated Press) 
 
 Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump waves to supporters as he arrives speaks before a crowd of 3,500 Saturday, July 11, 2015, in Phoenix. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin) (Associated Press) 
 
 Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump shakes hands prior to speaking at a rally before a crowd of 3,500 Saturday, July 11, 2015, in Phoenix. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin) (Associated Press) 
 
 Speaking to a gathering of Libertarians in Las Vegas before headlining an event in Phoenix, Trump repeated his charge that Mexico was sending violent offenders to the U.S. to harm Americans and that U.S. officials were being "dumb" in dealing with immigrants in the country illegally. 
 
 "These people wreak havoc on our population," he told a few thousand people attending the Libertarian gathering FreedomFest inside a Planet Hollywood ballroom on the Las Vegas Strip. 
 
 In the 4,200-capacity Phoenix convention center packed with flag-waving supporters, Trump took a different view — for a moment — and said: "I love the Mexican people. I love 'em. Many, many people from Mexico are legal. They came in the old-fashioned way. Legally." 
 
 He quickly returned to the sharp tone that has brought him scorn as well as praise. "I respect Mexico greatly as a country. But the problem we have is their leaders are much sharper than ours, and they're killing us at the border and they're killing us on trade." 
 
 His speeches in both venues were long on insults aimed at critics and short on solutions to the problems he cited. When he called for a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, the audience in Las Vegas groaned. 
 
 In a break from the immigration rhetoric that has garnered him condemnation and praise, Trump asserted that he would have more positive results in dealing with China and Russia if he were president and said he could be pals with Russian President Vladimir Putin. 
 
 Asked by an audience member in Las Vegas about U.S.-Russia relations, Trump said the problem is that Putin doesn't respect Obama. 
 
 "I think we would get along very, very well," he said. 
 
 Trump has turned to victims of crime to bolster his argument that immigrants in the U.S. illegally have killed and raped. In Las Vegas and Phoenix, he brought on stage Jamiel Shaw Sr., a Southern California man whose 17-year-old son was shot and killed in 2008 by a man in the country illegally. Shaw vividly described how his son was shot — in the head, stomach and hands while trying to block his face — and how he heard the gunshots as he talked to his son on the phone. 
 
 Shaw said he trusted Trump, and encouraged the crowds in both cities to do the same. 
 
 Trump's speeches were filled with tangents and insults leveled at business partners such as Univision and NBC that have dropped him in the wake of his comments that Mexican immigrants bring drugs and crime to the U.S. and are rapists. He also directed familiar barbs at other presidential contenders, including Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton ("the worst secretary of state in the history of the country"), news media figures ("lyin' Brian Williams") and President Barack Obama ("such a divisive person"). He called journalists "terrible people." 
 
 As Trump lambasted Univision for cancelling its broadcast of the Miss USA pageant, one of his many business enterprises, a group of young Latinos unfurled a banner pointed toward the stage and began chanting insults. They were quickly drowned out by the crowd, and nearby Trump supporters began to grab at them, tearing at the banner and pulling and pushing at the protesters. Security staff managed to get to the group and escorted them out as Trump resumed speaking. 
 
 "I wonder if the Mexican government sent them over here," he said. "I think so." 
 
 Arizona's tough-on-immigration Sheriff Joe Arpaio introduced Trump in Phoenix after outlining the things he and the candidate have in common, including skepticism that Obama was born in the United States. He went on to criticize the federal government for what he called a revolving door for immigrants, saying many of them end up in his jails. 
 
 "He's been getting a lot of heat, but you know, there's a silent majority out here," Arpaio said, borrowing from a phrase Richard Nixon popularized during his presidency in a speech about the Vietnam War. 
 
 A single protester standing outside the room where Trump spoke in Las Vegas was more concerned about the businessman being tied to the Libertarian Party. 
 
 "I've been a Libertarian for 43 years and Trump ain't no Libertarian," said Linda Rawles, who asserted that including Trump in FreedomFest set back the party's movement. 
 
 ___ 
 
 Pierceall reported from Las Vegas. ||||| The Post obtained transcripts of President Trump's January 2017 phone conversations with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. (The Washington Post) 
 
 President Trump is obsessed with this election win, thinks New Hampshire is a “drug-infested den,” worries about looking like “a dope” and doesn't want to talk publicly about who is going to pay for the wall. 
 
 These are among the themes and standout moments from Trump's January telephone conversations with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. The Washington Post's Greg Miller obtained transcripts of the calls and published them Thursday. 
 
 You can read the full, annotated transcripts here. The Fix has pulled out eight of the most jaw-dropping passages and added context: 
 
 1. TRUMP TO PEÑA NIETO: We have the drug lords in Mexico that are knocking the hell out of our country. They are sending drugs to Chicago, Los Angeles and to New York. Up in New Hampshire — I won New Hampshire because New Hampshire is a drug-infested den — is coming from the southern border. So we have a lot of problems with Mexico farther than the economic problem. We are becoming a drug-addicted nation and most of the drugs are coming from Mexico or certainly from the southern border. But I will say this — you have that problem, too. You have some pretty tough hombres in Mexico that you may need help with, and we are willing to help you with that big league. 
 
 Recall that Trump's critics hit him hard for using the phrase “bad hombres” during a presidential debate in October, so it is striking that he would repeat a variation in a call with the president of Mexico. Trump's dim appraisal of New Hampshire recalls his description of “American carnage” in his inauguration speech seven days earlier. It's not clear what win Trump was referencing. He lost the state by less than half a percentage point to Hillary Clinton but won the Republican primary there. 
 
 The Washington Post released the full transcripts of President Trump's calls with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull from January. Here's what the White House said about the conversations at the time. (Elyse Samuels/The Washington Post) 
 
 2. TRUMP TO TURNBULL: Look, I spoke to Putin, Merkel, Abe of Japan, to France today, and this was my most unpleasant call. 
 
 This is extraordinary language for the leader of one friendly country to say to another. The whole point of these phone calls, days after Trump was inaugurated, was for the two leaders to get to know each other and start things off on the best possible note. Trump steamrolled that objective when he compared his conversation with the Australian prime minister, leader of one of America's staunchest allies, to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who had just meddled in the U.S. election, and deemed Putin more pleasant. The Post published a summary of this conversation in February, reporting that "25 minutes into what was expected to be an hour-long call, Trump abruptly ended it.” Now the full transcript is public. 
 
 3. PEÑA NIETO: To tell you the truth, Mr. President, I feel quite surprised about this new proposal that you are making because it is different from the discussion that both of our teams have been holding. 
 
 TRUMP: Enrique, if I can interrupt — this is not a new proposal. This is what I have been saying for a year and a half on the campaign trail. I have been telling this to every group of 50,000 people or 25,000 people — because no one got the people in their rallies as big as I did. But I have been saying I wanted to tax people that treated us unfairly at the border, and Mexico is treating us unfairly. 
 
 The proposal that caught Peña Nieto by surprise was a tariff on goods imported from Mexico to the United States. Trump agreed that a tariff had not been discussed in talks between White House adviser Jared Kushner and Mexican Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray but said Peña Nieto should have expected it, based on Trump's campaign rhetoric. Note the way Trumps slips in a boast about his crowd size. 
 
 4. TRUMP TO TURNBULL: I hate taking these people. I guarantee you they are bad. That is why they are in prison right now. They are not going to be wonderful people who go on to work for the local milk people. 
 
 In both phone calls, Trump seems singularly focused on bad people getting into the U.S. and how bad it will make him look. He had just signed an executive order banning travelers from seven majority-Muslim nations (which courts would later block). His logic is that if he agrees to take in 1,250 immigrants who landed in Australia, per a deal the Obama administration made, he'll look like a hypocrite. Especially if Trump's greatest fear is realized and one of these people turns into the “Boston bomber” (his words) or the next “San Bernardino or World Trade Centers” (also his words). Nevermind that Turnbull explains to Trump, several times, that these immigrants were vetted both by Australian and U.S. security officials. 
 
 5. TRUMP TO PEÑA NIETO: In the latest election, I won with a large percentage of Hispanic voters. I do not know if you heard, but with Cuba, I had 84 percent with the Cuban American vote. But overall generally, I had well over 30 percent, and everyone was shocked to see this. I understand the community, and they understand me, and I have a great respect for the Mexican people. 
 
 Trump loves to brag about his victory, but it is not clear where he came up with his statistic about Cuban American voters. According to the Pew Research Center, Trump did win 54 percent of the Cuban American vote in Florida, but the White House has not been able to back up Trump's claim to have won 84 percent of the Cuban American vote nationally. On the overall Latino vote, Trump is in the ballpark. He got 28 percent of the vote, according to exit polling. 
 
 6. TRUMP TO TURNBULL: What is the thing with boats? Why do you discriminate against boats? 
 
 In these phone calls, Trump also displays a very shallow understanding of foreign policy. Here, he seems baffled by Australia's policy of rejecting refugees who arrive by boat, despite the fact that Turnbull had also explained several times that it's a deterrent policy: Anyone who tries to migrate to Australia by water will automatically get kicked out. “So we said if you try to come to Australia by boat, even if we think you are the best person in the world, even if you are a Nobel Prize winning genius, we will not let you in,” Turnbull finally says. 
 
 7. TRUMP TO PEÑA NIETO: In Ohio, they are having rallies for Trump right now because Trump has taken a hard stance on Mexico. We lost a lot of factories in Ohio and Michigan, and I won these states — some of these states have not been won in 38 years by a Republican, and I won them very easily. So they are dancing in the streets. You probably have the same thing where they are dancing in your streets also but in reverse. 
 
 Trump's habit of talking about himself in the third person is on display here — as is his sense of humor. His line about Mexicans dancing in the streets “in reverse” appears to be a joke about protests against his election. 
 
 8. TRUMP TO TURNBULL: I look like a dope.
– As Donald Trump continues to trade volleys with Latinos, he took his unrepentant show to Phoenix last night, where he told an enthusiastic crowd that waited hours in 100-degree temps that "we have to take back the heart of our country" and that he was "ready to go right at the Mexican government. I’m going to charge them $25,000 per illegal immigrant and, oh, I’ll make them pay." Trump used the 70-minute speech, which the Washington Post characterizes as more a "stream-of-consciousness rant than a presidential-style stump speech," which "put an exclamation point on his bombastic push" to focus on immigration. "These are people that shouldn’t be in our country," Trump told the crowd of between 3,500 and 4,200. "They flow in like water." He also took the opportunity to further hammer away at GOP golden boy Jeb Bush, saying, "let's say he's president—oy, yoy, yoy. How can I be tied with this guy? He's terrible. Terrible. He's weak on immigration." Bush wasn't Trump's only whipping boy: Also attracting the candidate's scorn, per the Post, were "Macy’s, NBC, NASCAR, Caroline Kennedy, Hillary Rodham Clinton and, several times, the media." (The candidate avoided attracting Neil Young's wrath again and left the stage to "We're Not Gonna Take It" by Twisted Sister.) Trump spoke earlier in the day to a Libertarian crowd in Las Vegas, notes the AP, striking a slightly more nuanced tone: "I love the Mexican people. I respect Mexico greatly as a country. But the problem we have is their leaders are much sharper than ours, and they're killing us at the border and they're killing us on trade." (Even as Trump spoke, Mexico was having a little trouble keeping a notorious drug lord on lockdown.)