Five candidates for president weighed in on the violent clashes in Chicago at a planned Friday night rally for Republican frontrunner Donald Trump.
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Kevan Ockerman, a carpenter and diner worker from Gardner, Kan., lined up about 10:30 a.m.to see Trump. “Emotions are so strong that in any city with a large minority population, it will become pretty tempting”. “I doubt there will be any problem”.
“When you have a campaign that affirmatively encourages violence”, Texas Senator Cruz said, “you create an environment that only encourages this sort of nasty discourse”. “We were not allowed to exercise our 1st Amendment rights”. “And it’s clear to me that he knows what he’s doing”. “I think it’s disgraceful, personally”. But don’t be disruptive. Ted Cruz – sidestepped a question about whether outbursts of violence at Trump’s rallies and his statements encouraging supporters to aggressively take on protesters concerned them. It stretched along the entire 1200 block of Main Street.
Trump attacked the Chicago protesters from the stage in Cleveland, blaming them for all the violence that occurred and warning that they just enraged his supporters more.
At the Cleveland rally, more than a dozen officers on horseback patrolled the outside as police helicopters buzzed overhead.
The months-long Republican race may be coming to a head at nominating contests on Tuesday where Mr Trump is seeking victories that may give him an nearly insurmountable lead for the nomination.
“Are we going to win OH!?” he boomed, earning a deafening roar from the crowd that gathered just three days before OH holds its presidential primaries for Republicans and Democrats.
The camera closes in on Trump as he taunts the unseen protestor (or is he directing his ire at yesterday’s Chicago demonstrators?). After an organizer took to the stage to announce the plug had been pulled, a few skirmishes broke out between Trump backers and the protesters inside and outside the arena. He said someone called him “ISIS” as he stood in line.
As he did the previous night in a round of phoned in TV interviews, Trump didn’t walk back any of his rhetoric Saturday. Taken together, they exposed anew the remarkable anxiety ripping through a country dealing with profound economic and demographic changes, as well as the anger roiling inside one of America’s great political parties. That police spokesman, Anthony Guglielmi, said the department had adequate manpower to cover the rally.
“There’s only one presidential candidate who has violence at their events”, Rubio said.
Trump’s first rally of the day, at an airplane hangar in Dayton, Ohio, passed off without major disturbance – until the very end when a protester jumped on stage towards Trump, before the Secret Service intervened. CBS News said reporter Sopan Deb, who has been covering the Trump campaign since last summer, was thrown to the ground and handcuffed. Others on Twitter using #ShutItDown indicated they were emboldened by their success in contributing to the cancellation of the Chicago event.
“As is the case virtually every day, Donald Trump is showing the American people that he is a pathological liar”.
Protesters were asked to show up at the Midland at 3 p.m. and stay for 90 minutes or so.
Mayor Sly James pleaded for peaceful protests.
After the threat is contained, the Secret Service cedes the stage back to Trump, and the crowd stars chanting Trump’s name, then “USA! USA!”
He also wavered on his earlier vow to support any Republican nominee, even Trump.
“If they refuse to do that, they don’t deserve our support”, he said.
Rubio faulted Trump for joking at a January rally with Sarah Palin in Iowa that he would pay the legal fees of any supporter who would “knock the crap out of” any protester who hurled a tomato at him.
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“But in any campaign, responsibility starts at the top”, he continued. If you see violence, condemn it. And let me tell you, the reason they’re doing it is because there’s never been anything like this that’s happened before.
