Trump also came out in defense of his campaign manager, staunchly denying that he grabbed a protester at a rally in Tucson, Arizona on Saturday. There is another man behind Lewandowski in the video, who also touches the protester, and the protester does react toward that man, not Lewandowski, but the video footage clearly shows Lewandowski with his hand on the collar of the protester.
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Meanwhile, Trump’s campaign spokesperson Hope Hicks has revealed that the Republican front-runner “does not condone violence at his rallies”. Lewandowski and another man can be seen confronting the protester before they pull him back by his collar in a video obtained by CNN. Hicks said Lewandowski “simply asked the protester to leave”.
Trump appeared on ABC’s “This Week” Sunday, where he again denied that Lewandowski grabbed the protester. “He wanted to take down those awful, profanity-laced signs”.
“They had signs up in that area, that were horrendous, that I can not say what they said on the sign”, Trump said of the incident in Tucson.
Trump told Stephanopoulos that he doesn’t condone violence but went on the blame the “sick” protesters, saying that he’s not necessarily upset by the supporter punching the protester.
But even with no clear consensus on whether Lewandowski was responsible for the physical altercation, it is clear that he was involved in handling the protester. I think you leave these things up to the professionals.
“This happened to be an African-American man who was very – a person at the rally, who was very, very incensed at the fact that somebody, a protester, would be wearing a Ku Klux Klan outfit”, Trump said of Pettway, on “This Week”.
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The incident carried echoes of an assault in Fayetteville, N.C., earlier this month in which a man slipped past security and sucker-punched a protester as he was being led out of the venue.
