Donald Trump takes stage for Illinois rally — campaign live
- Acrimony reigns over campaign after protests turn violent
- Republican frontrunner blames supporters of Vermont senator
- Ted Cruz: the devil Democrats know – but is he the lesser evil?
- Feeling the Bern for Trump? Sanders fans who won’t vote Clinton
Updated
Hillary Clinton, absent from the talk-show circuit this Sunday, may have been glad to avoid the attention, writes my colleague Lauren Gambino after a week of following the Democratic frontrunner on the trail.
By Saturday night Hillary Clinton was ready for a Guinness.
After greeting a throng of people at O’Donold’s Irish Pub and Grill in Youngstown, Ohio, on Saturday night, a bartender handed Clinton a pint of Guinness.
“Everyone, to Hillary Clinton! The next president of the United States,” a supporter shouted, raising her glass. Clinton smiled and raised her glass to what no doubt she hoped was a brighter end to a rough few days.
The 48-hours of misfires began on Friday, when Clinton lauded Nancy Reagan for starting “a national conversation” about the HIV/Aids epidemic, a virus that was killing thousands of gay men while the Reagans were in the White House. Clinton quickly issued a contrite statement that said she had misspoken, and followed her apology with a Medium post that reflected on the early LGBT activism around the virus – and the deadly silence that followed.
“To be clear, the Reagans did not start a national conversation about HIV and AIDS,” she wrote. “That distinction belongs to generations of brave lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people, along with straight allies, who started not just a conversation but a movement that continues to this day.”
Still, the misstep gave her opponent, Bernie Sanders, and his supporters new ammunition with just days to go before the a series of important primary contests.
“I just don’t know what she was talking about,” Sanders told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday morning. “That was a tragic moment,” he said. “I’m glad she apologized.”
Then again on Friday, violent clashes erupted at a Donald Trump rally in Chicago after the event was cancelled. In response to the unrest, Clinton issued a statement that invoked the Charleston killings, a statement that critics called patronizing and having missed the point.
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton)March 12, 2016
Violence has no place in our politics. We should use our words and deeds to bring Americans together. pic.twitter.com/FofjognpIA
The next morning, Clinton took tried again to address the Chicago rally.
“The ugly, divisive rhetoric we are hearing from Donald Trump and the encouragement of violence and aggression is wrong, and it’s dangerous,” Clinton told volunteers at a campaign stop at O’Fallon Park Recreation Complex in St Louis.
“If you play with matches, you’re going to start a fire you can’t control. That’s not leadership. That’s political arson.”
Then, speaking at a rally in St Louis, on Saturday, Clinton tried to strike Sanders for his record on health care reform, suggesting he hasn’t always been such a robust proponent of a single-payer healthcare plan.
“Where was he when I was trying to get health care in ’93 and ’94?” Clinton asked rhetorically at a rally in St Louis on Saturday afternoon.
“Literally, standing right behind her,” Mike Casca, a Sanders’s spokesman shot back, posting a photo from a speech Clinton gave in 1994, when she was first lady.
— mike casca (@cascamike)March 12, 2016
literally standing right behind her. https://t.co/B2cvs4UNthhttps://t.co/oVA6WccMmZpic.twitter.com/QeKLnBG337
At the bar later that evening, a reporter asked Clinton if that was the best Guiness she’d ever had. “It’s the best Guinness I’ve ever had,” she said. “A Youngstown Guinness!”
“The best Guinness she’s ever had!” a man in the bar yelled.
Donald Trump did several interviews this morning, but in none was he asked about a criminal complaint filed against his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, by a reporter who alleges that he assaulted her last week.
The reporter, Michelle Fields of the rightwing and pro-Trump site Breitbart, had visible bruises on her arms and at least one other journalist witness the incident, which happened at a Trump rally. The billionaire and Lewandowski have accused her of making it up.
Fields’ employer has also quashed any reporting or commenting on the story, prompting Breitbart’s spokesperson, Kurt Bardella, to quit on Friday. He told CNN that night that his former bosses and Trump are simply lying.
“They have been very supportive of the Trump campaign, and I think there is a desire to want to believe the Trump campaign,” he said. “I think when you’ve gone all-in so much for a candidate, when you have that kind of skin in the game, you don’t want to see that derailed.”
Buzzfeed also found that Breitbart’s editor-at-large volunteered to be a speechwriterfor the billionaire’s campaign.
Updated
CBS has finally come round to Bernie Sanders, to ask him the questions he has been asked three or four times already this morning. He’s in St Louis.
Would he tell his supporters to disrupt Trump rallies, as Trump claims? “No, not to disrupt rallies … that’s never what we do.”
Sanders is another candidate looking pale, speaking through a throat ravaged by a thousand stump speeches and the recycled air of a thousand campaign flights. He doesn’t look as existentially haunted as Marco Rubio, though, as he gets down to one of his favourite things: discussing universal healthcare. He duly discusses it with a sort of grim enjoyment.
Asked about Hillary Clinton still taking more delegates than him all-round despite his winning big states such as Michigan, he goes for the candidate’s eternal response: “We have momentum.”
…and more Kasich, who tells CBS “when I show up I talk about how we can fix things” and “since I’ve been so positive it must be contagious because the last debate was great”. Ah, Sunny John, to borrow Sunny Jim Callaghan’s prime ministerial nickname. Crisis in poll numbers? What crisis?
He says, if you wondered, he will win Ohioand become president, then “solve our most vexing problems using conservative principles”.
He also, basically, hedges on pledging to support the nominee whoever it is, if it’s Donald Trump.
Sopan Deb, the CBS reporter arrested in Chicago on Friday, is now speaking… to CBS.
“There was total pandemonium,” he says, describing how he filmed a man with a bloodied head being arrested and also a scuffle that broke out.
He adds: “Before I knew it a police officer… pulled me down by the hood of my hoodie… put a boot to my neck and cuffed me.”
The police did not listen to his protestations, he says, describing an hour spent handcuffed in a van with other arrestees – including the man with the bloodied head – and his transfer to a station to be charged with resisting arrest.
John Dickerson ends the brief segment: “Sopan is back on the trail with Donald Trump today.”
Trump may pay assaulter's fees, fears tomatoes
Donald Trump returns to the airwaves on NBC’s Meet the Press. Does he take any responsibility for the “escalated tension”, as host Chuck Todd describes protests in Chicago?
Trump takes credit only for preventing injuries and clashes. He blames protesters, whom he says “weren’t really protesters, they were disrupters, like professionals … these were professionally made signs.”
Todd confronts Trump with the video of him calling for punches to protesters, and then a video of a supporter suckerpunching a protester.
Trump: “I don’t accept responsibility, I do not condone violence in any shape, and I will tell you from what I saw the young man stuck his finger in the air and the other man just sort of had it. But I don’t condone violence.”
He then defends his call to punch someone, saying “We had somebody who was punching, and vicious, and had gone crazy, I’m telling you they’re not protesters, they’re disrupters.”
Trump says he feared an injury by hurled tomato. “Now if you get hit in the face with a tomato, let me tell you, with somebody with a strong arm, at least, let me tell you, it can be very damaging. Not good.”
The billionaire segues into blaming the media, saying “When they punch, it’s OK. when my people punch back because they have to out of self-defense, it’s terrible.”
He then waffles on whether he thinks that sucker-punched protester deserved to be hit, saying he wants to know what the man was doing before he was hit. “From what I heard there as a lot of taunting and a certain finger was put in the air, not nice, again I don’t condone [violence].” …
So will you pay legal fees of the man who hit him, as you’ve promised?
Trump says he might: “I’ve actually instructed my people to look into it, yes.”
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Donald Trump now on CBS, a bit like Big Brother looming on all channels.
He follows the same plan as he did on CNN and CBS: of course he does. He’s sitting in the same seat, asked the same opening question: do you condone violence? Only when two people have tomatoes and are willing to throw them, he says.
The protester punched in North Carolina – disrupter, sorry – made a “terrible, terrible gesture” with his middle finger, says Trump, implying said disrupter thus deserved to be smashed in the face. And it’s also Bernie’s fault and it’s just not fair how the press treats him. These disrupters: they stop Trump speaking and that’s bad. But he tells the police not to hurt them.
Now we’re on to H1B visas. Why does Donald use them and other laws on tax and immigration to his advantage while preaching fairness in such matters?
“I’m not doing anything wrong, I don’t think those visas should be allowed but they are, they’re the law of the land. I’m a businessman.”
He never went bankrupt either, he adds, unprompted.
If tragedy plus time equals comedy, what does absurdity plus time equal? Surreality?
John Kasich is next up on Fox. Chris Wallace challenges him about his underperformance in Michigan last week, a similar state to his own Ohio where he has to win on Tuesday. Kasich came third in Michigan.
Kasich, uncharacteristically testy, rejects this: he has momentum coming out of Michigan, he shared delegates with second-placed Ted Cruz, he’s going to win Ohio and “we’re rising in Illinois”.
“Just give us a chance,” he says, pleading for more media coverage. Wallace points out he is on Fox News Sunday today, and asks if Kasich fans in Florida should vote Rubio to stop Trump, as Rubio has said his fans in Ohio should vote for Kasich.
“I’m not out to stop anybody, I’m out to get elected,” he says. “This is not a parlour game for me.”
It should be noted that there are not many Rubio fans in Ohio, and not many Kasich fans in Florida.
He’s also asked about his stated support for free trade, not a popular position on the Republican trail at the moment, particularly in industrial states like his.
“It’s not just free trade, it’s fair trade,” he says, arguing for free trade with the ability to make trade not free should America feel badly done by, aka: having one’s cake and eating it, as my mum will still bafflingly say.
Marco Rubio appears on This Week. He repeats his earlier remarks that there are “unbalanced people” out there who hear Donald Trump and are liable to do anything at his encouragement.
“We’re going to have an ugly scene here, we’ve already had these ugly scenes.”
He repeats his stump line that American politics now look “like the comments section of a blog”.
Stephanopoulos asks whether standing up to violence is more important than standing by a pledge to support the Republican nominee. “Absolutely we have to stand up to it,” he says, but he still won’t out and reject the pledge. “I’ll be honest with you it’s getting harder every day.”
“I do not want the conservative movement or the Republican party to be defined,” by what Donald Trump is saying, Rubio adds. He says that the billionaire is playing on people’s emotions and “asking them to give you power so you can go after another group of people.”
“Real leadership is recognizing people are angry, recognizing that people are frustrated, and showing them a way forward.”
The election has “turned into a real circus, and now it’s turned into something even worse,” he finishes.
Updated
So will Ted Cruz support Donald Trump if he’s the nominee, as he’s said many times before?
“Well, listen, I think if Donald Trump is the nominee I think it’s a disaster for Republicans,” Cruz dodges. “It makes it much, much, much more likely that Hillary Clinton is the president.”
“The answer is not to cry in your beer about it, the answer is not what the Washington establishment is doing which is to try to come up with some magical plan to have a brokered convention.”
Stephanopoulos presses him – is he condoning Trump’s encouragement of violence, then?
“I’m not condoning it,” Cruz says. “But my focus is on winning. Winning the nomination and then beating Hillary Clinton.”
Then he throws a wrinkle in his line that the party should not try to broker the convention, saying there’s difference between a brokered contention and a contested one.
The former would be a “absolute disaster” of party leaders trying to engineer a candidate, he says, and would cause “a revolt”. That’s versus a contested convention, he says, which would allow “the delegates to decide”.
“If Donald and I both go into the convention and we both got a big chunk of delegates ,” he says, “then the delegates will decide, and that’s allowing democracy to operate.”
Wallace ends his Fox News Sunday chat with Trump by promising the candidate will like his final question. He didn’t like previous ones about his remarks on Muslims and Trump University. The question is: how do you feel about perhaps wrapping up this race on Tuesday?
Trump does like it, but he doesn’t discuss it. He just reels off the same campaign points/buzzwords as before and then returns to his disavowal of any responsibility for violence at and around his events.
“We did a good job by postponing the other day in Chicago,” Trump says. “No injuries, Chris. No injuries.”
Wallace signs off: “Stay safe on the campaign trail, Mr Trump.”
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