PHOENIX — U.S. President Donald Trump said he is willing to risk a budget crisis in order to honor a campaign pledge to build what he called an “absolutely necessary” wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

“If we have to close down the government, we are building that wall,” Trump said Tuesday night during a campaign-style rally at the Phoenix Convention Center. He added that in electing him last November, the American people “voted for immigration control.”

Funding for the wall will need to be approved by the U.S. Congress, which has not yet completed work on a budget for the U.S. government for fiscal 2018, which begins Oct. 1. Congressional Democrats oppose the idea of the wall, prompting Trump on Tuesday night to label them as “obstructionist.”

The president also used his rally speech to go on an extended tirade against the media, equating reporters with traitors calling them “bad people who “don’t like our country.”

Trump recited previous statements he made criticizing neo-Nazis, white supremacists and the Ku Klux Klan following the fatal August 12 clash in Charlottesville, Virginia. But he omitted the most controversial words he used to blame the violence “on both sides.”

Trump also accused the media of not reporting his comments.

“Did they report I said racism is evil?”

“No!” the crowd loudly replied.

“I’m a person who wants to tell the truth,” Trump declared. “I’m an honest person.”

GOP senators under fire

Arizona’s two Republican U.S. senators, who have both clashed with the president, skipped the event. Trump criticized both John McCain and Jeff Flake without mentioning their names.[xyz-ihs snippet=”Adsense-responsive”]Trump’s presence in the Western state, where he beat Democrat Hillary Clinton by 3.5 percentage points in last year’s presidential election, drew tens of thousands of his supporters and protesters to downtown Phoenix, and intense precautions by security forces hoping to prevent violence.

Watch: Themes From President Trump’s Phoenix Rally

Protesters taunted those waiting in line to enter the rally with chants of “Shame, shame, shame,” “No hate in our state,” and “No Trump, No KKK, No fascist USA.”

Minutes after Trump finished his campaign-style rally, police fired teargas and percussive (stun) grenades on protesters outside the venue.

“People in the crowd have begun throwing rocks and bottles at police. They also dispersed some gas in the area,” the Phoenix Police Department said in a statement.

Tense encounters as @realDonaldTrump rally ends and some confront those opposing the Trump administration. pic.twitter.com/oaWrB9gIS1

— Steve Herman (@W7VOA) August 23, 2017

Along the US border

Before the political event in the Arizona capital, the president headed to a Marine Corps base in Yuma, on the border with Mexico and a center of U.S. Border Patrol operations in the area.

The interim director of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, Tom Homan, told reporters aboard Air Force One as the presidential jet headed to Arizona: “The president’s message is that we need a strong border and we need stronger … enforcement.”

Trump’s visit to the Border Patrol base included a scheduled inspection of enforcement aircraft, including a drone and a helicopter, and meetings to evaluate the Border Patrol’s operational results, policies and morale “in the lead-up to fiscal year 2018,” another administration official told reporters.

What U.S. teams guarding the border have done since Trump took office seven months ago “has worked,” Homan said. “We need funding to make it permanent. We need to build a wall. A border wall [will be] successful.”

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