Washington D.C., March 13: A day after altercations and protests forced him to cancel a campaign rally in Chicago, US presidential candidate Donald Trump called for protesters who disrupt his rallies to be arrested.
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The controversial candidate has been met with other confrontations on the campaign trail this weekend.
Trump briefly ducked at the podium and four Secret Service agents scrambled to surround him after a man apparently broke through a security perimeter near the stage at Dayton International Airport in Ohio.
In Bloomington, some protesters said they felt emboldened to stand in a light but steady drizzle only after seeing reports of clashes at Trump rallies in OH and Kansas City on Saturday.
Following Friday’s rally, the Chicago Police Department said three men from Chicago and a 45-year-old woman from MI were arrested and charged for participating in a disturbance at the protest, which drew hundreds of people to the University of IL at Chicago.
“We’re going to take our country back from these people”. At a rally in Cleveland, Ohio on Saturday, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton criticized Trump for starting a fire he could not control. But he can’t order anyone to be arrested for simply disrupting his speech.
Still, Sanders said Trump carries the blame for the escalating tensions at his events.
Trump took the stage speaking on issues ranging from the economy to religion, at one point even pulling a supporter on stage.
A number of Trump rallies have been interrupted by protesters before.
“All of a sudden a planned attack just came out of nowhere”, Trump said, adding that his supporters “were taunted, they were harassed by these other people, these other people by the way, some represented Bernie, our communist friend”.
Trump, meanwhile, rejected calls to modify his campaign rhetoric amid increasing instances of violence at his events.
On the Democratic side, Sanders said he has “millions of supporters”, some of whom “will do what they do”.
The billionaire said the protester in Dayton who tried to harm him was either an ISIS supporter or was part of it.
Trump, on a series of Sunday morning television appearances, rebutted strong criticism from Republican rivals and Democrats that he was encouraging discord with divisive language disparaging Muslims and illegal immigrants. “A disgrace if you want to know the truth”.
“We’re all together and we want to get along with everybody, but when they have organised, professionally staged wise guys we’ve got to fight back, we’ve got to fight back”, Trump said.
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“He is catching onto the fact that the American people do not support a candidate like Trump whose verbiage, whose language, whose rhetoric incites violence”, Sanders said.
