At one point during Wednesday night’s rally, Trump described an altercation at a past event between the audience and a protester, whom he described as “a real bad dude”.
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– At a late February rally, Trump said of one protester, “I’d like to punch him in the face, I tell ya”.
“I want to see what that young man was doing”, he said of Jones, who is black.
He added that despite Jones flipping off the crowd, he does not condone violence and thinks that McGraw merely “got carried away”.
Donald Trump says he’s “instructed my people” to explore the possibility of helping pay the legal bills for a 78-year-old man charged with assault at a Trump rally.
“It’s happening at all these rallies now and they’re letting it ride”, Jones said.
And when Trump appeared at another rally Saturday morning in OH, he was suddenly pulled midspeech into a protective ring of U.S. Secret Service agents charged with guarding his life after a man rushed the stage.
The alleged assault Wednesday night against the protester occurred seemingly out of the blue as a group of protesters were being escorted out of the building. Butler said the deputies who were escorting out the protester did not actually see the assault take place.
On Thursday, the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office announced it was investigating why Jones was arrested but not his assailant, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Jones said he and his friends were not arrested. They later viewed footage of the event to identify McGraw.
“We are on top of this”, Swain said.
Mr Trump, who is the Republican front runner for November’s White House election, was interrupted by protesters 17 times as he gave a speech at the venue. Another protester who was with Jones also filmed the incident from his perspective.
“He had no right to put his hands on me”, Jones said in a telephone interview.
Yet Trump on Sunday again assured his supporters that their anger and even their occasional punches are righteous, because they are “disenfranchised” economically and provoked by “disrupters” that he says are sent by Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders’ campaign.
Trump has drawn heat for how he has addressed violence against protesters, saying last fall that the Black Lives Matter protester maybe “should have been roughed up”. So if you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would you?
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“I promise, I promise”, Trump said.
