Summary
We’re wrapping up our live coverage of today’s events. Here’s a summary of what they were…
- Donald Trump blamed protesters for the violence perpetrated against them at his rallies – a second man in two weeks was sucker-punched at a Trump event on Saturday. “At what point do people blame the protesters,” Trump asked ABC.
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“These are professional agitators,” he added, without evidence. He specifically blamed Saturday’s violence on a protester who wore a Ku Klux Klan costume to a Tucson rally, in an apparent allusion to Trump’s dithering condemnation of white supremacist groups.
- He also said he would tell supporters not to riot at the Republican convention should he lack the delegates for a secure victory there. “We don’t condone violence,” he said. “And we have very little violence.”
- The Republican frontrunner for president also defended his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, whom was captured on video with a hand on a protester at the same Tucson rally. “I give him credit for having spirit, he wanted them to take down those horrible profanity laced signs,” Trump said, repeating a campaign statement that Lewandowski did not in fact touch the protester, despite the video. Lewandowski faces a separate criminal complaint for allegedly assaulting a reporter.
- Ohio Governor John Kasich rejected calls to drop out of the Republican primary, and insisted that he would manage to sweep a victory out of a contested convention even though he trails Trump and Ted Cruz by hundreds of delegates. “Nobody’s going to have the delegates they need going to the convention,” he told CBS. “Why don’t they drop out? I’m the one that can win in the fall.”
- Senator Lindsey Graham pleaded with Kasich to quit so that anti-Trump Republicans could coalesce around Cruz, the only candidate with a mathematical chance to beat the businessman outright. “John Kasich is the most electable Republican [but] I don’t think he has a chance to win,” Graham told CBS. “Mr Trump is an interloper and a demagogue of the greatest proportions.”
- Democratic underdog Bernie Sanders hinted at a quiet campaign to persuade superdelegates to his cause: “I think it might be a good idea for superdelegates to listen to the people in their own state.”
- He also argued that although Hillary Clinton “creamed us” in the deep south, he would find success in the progressive west.
- And a surprising poll out of Utah found that the state, a five-decade stalwart for Republicans in the general election, would swing to the Democrats by double digits for Sanders against Trump. Clinton had a narrower, two-point lead over Trump in the same poll.
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Rick Perry has quashed rumors that the former Texas governor could ride in as a party knight to defeat Donald Trump in a contested convention. Vote Ted Cruz, says Perry’s aide de camp, Jeff Miller.
@GovernorPerry has no interest in running as a 3rd party candidate. For the good of the country, he wants the GOP to unite around @tedcruz
— Jeff Miller (@JeffMillerCA2TX) March 20, 2016
The Republican frontrunner, who has by one measure received almost $2bn of media attention – and who himself frequently calls cable talk shows and spent a decade doing reality TV – has now tried to shift blame on the media, for blaming his supporters for violently attacking protesters. He would prefer that the media blame protesters who caused a traffic jam and did not punch anyone.
Why is it that the horrendous protesters, who scream, curse punch, shut down roads/doors during my RALLIES, are never blamed by media? SAD!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 20, 2016
Here’s what happened on Saturday in Tucson:
Last Friday in Chicago:
In North Carolina earlier this month:
And during a cable TV appearance last weekend, during which Trump said he might pay the legal fees for the puncher in the North Carolina incident:
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Utah poll puts Trump down to any Democrat
A new Deseret News/KSL poll has found that Donald Trump would deliver Utah, a state that has voted Republican for more than 50 years, to Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders in a general election.
A hypothetical matchup between Clinton and Trump has the Democrat ahead by a slim margin: 38% to 36%.
Sanders has a double-digit lead over Trump, according to the poll: 48% to 37%.
Per the poll’s co-sponsor, the Desert News:
“Wow. Wow. That’s surprising,” said Chris Karpowitz, co-director of Brigham Young University’s Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy. “Any matchup in which Democrats are competitive in the state of Utah is shocking.”
Either Ted Cruz or John Kasich would solidly beat the Democrats in a general election, the poll found, with Sanders coming closest to Cruz, 39% to 53%. Pollster Dan Jones & Associates surveyed 500 registered voters.
Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican nominee and a Mormon and Utah resident, won the state by nearly 50 points when he faced Barack Obama there in the last presidential election. Romney has stood up as one of the few prominent Republicans to publicly repudiate Trump and his campaign’s “racism, misogyny, bigotry” and the violence that have followed it.
Trump has responded by saying Romney “choked like a dog” in 2012.
Mitt Romney is a mixed up man who doesn't have a clue. No wonder he lost!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 18, 2016
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Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are set to speak to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) today, before members of the most powerful pro-Israel lobbying group in Washington DC.
Trump raised eyebrows among conservatives earlier this year when he said he would be “a neutral guy” with regard to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, and this morning on ABC said he would negotiate “a deal [that] would be in Israel’s interests”.
“There is nobody more pro-Israel than I am,” he said. “I don’t know one Jewish person that doesn’t want to have a deal.”
Coincidentally, the Pew Research Center took a look at just what American and Israeli Jews want out of the divisive conflict.
Annual #AIPAC meeting starts Sunday. A look at views of US & Israeli Jews on key issues https://t.co/pVm527gM7V htt… pic.twitter.com/ZN33A3fIhD
— Pew Research Center (@pewresearch) March 20, 2016
If the Sunday shows are a window on to what Washington is talking about – at least for the two and a half hours they take up, from the appetiser that is CNN’s State of the Union to the serving of coffee and cigars round NBC’s Meet the Press Round Table – then on this Sunday Washington is not talking, much, about Cuba.
So in case anyone remains unaware, President Obama lands there later today for the first visit by a US president since 1928. The Republican candidates to succeed him in the White House – one of whom’s dads was Cuban-born – think this, like the policy of detente which brought it about, is a Very Bad Thing. We can expect the rhetoric to ramp up over the next three days.
Our Latin America correspondent, Jonathan Watts, is in Havana, as is DC bureau chief Dan Roberts. There follows Jonathan’s latest filing:
Jonathan and Dan will be reporting from the ground when Obama has landed on it. And if you wondered, the last US president to visit was Calvin Coolidge, aka Silent Cal.
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Harry Reid: 'facade is cracking' as Republicans resist supreme court nomination
More from Mitch McConnell, from Ed Helmore, and some choice words in response from Harry Reid. McConnell has doubled, tripled and quadrupled down on his stance against any hearing for Obama supreme court nominee Merrick Garland today. Appearing on NBC’s Meet the Press, he said:
We’re not giving lifetime appointments to a president on his way out the door that will change the character of the court for 25 years. We’re not going to be confirming a justice this year.
Senate minority leader Reid, however, told the same program he thinks the Senate Republicans’ tactics will rebound rather nastily in their own November elections:
We believe there should be a full vote. [McConnell] is marching his senators over a cliff and I don’t think they’re going to go. The facade is cracking and I think were going to get a breakthrough.
I blame the Republicans. Their excuses are lame. They’re going to end losing seats. It’s so foolish.
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Graham: Trump is a demagogue of greatest proportions
Senator Lindsey Graham, an erstwhile Republican candidate for president and one of the few party leaders to voice the Senate’s anxieties about Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, appears next on the CBS show.
Host John Dickerson asks Graham about his past criticism of Cruz, whom the senator has recently endorsed. Graham has joked that Cruz is so disliked in the Senate he could be murdered there, and that picking between the senator and the businessman is like a choice between “being shot and poisoned”.
“Maybe you can find an antidote,” Graham cracks to the CBS host.
“Donald Trump would be an absolute, utter disaster for the Republican party, destroy conservatism as we know it,” he continues. “Ronald Reagan had a three legged stool of conservatism, fiscal social and national security,” he says, while Trump’s “four-legged stool” is built in part on “xenophobia and racial bigotry”.
“That is not conservatism,” Graham says. “Ted Cruz in my view is a real Republican who I often disagree with.”
What about Ohio Governor John Kasich, Dickerson asks.
“John Kasich is the most electable Republican [but] I don’t think he has a chance to win,” Graham says. “Kasich is an insider and most of the delegates are looking for an outsider.”
Graham says he “loves” John Kasich but his presence in the race makes it harder to defeat the frontrunner. The senator stresses in no uncertain terms how much he abhors Trump.
“I’d rather lose without him than win with him,” he says, because the businessman threatens to “destroy the party that I love”.
“As much as I disagree with Ted Cruz, I think he’s a real Republican,” he adds. “Mr Trump is an interloper and a demagogue of the greatest proportions.” His “foreign policy is gibberish”, he adds.
Dickerson asks whether Graham will not vote for Trump should he become the nominee. Graham doesn’t say no. “We can lose an election but I don’t want us to lose our heart and soul.”
Sanders: Clinton won big in states Democrats lose
Bernie Sanders is the only Democrat on the docket this morning. He’s on the CBS program with John Dickerson.
Dickerson asks him about the math: Hillary Clinton has a nigh insurmountable lead in delegates and superdelegates combined.
Sanders says he thinks his campaign has a good path forward, even though “the deep south” was “not a strong area for us”. He points out that in Illinois and Missouri the campaigns nearly split the delegates, because they are awarded proportional to votes.
“She creamed us in Mississippi and Louisiana and South Carolina,” he admits, before adding that Democrats are “not going to win those states in the general election”.
“As we head to the west coast, which is probably the most progressive part of America,” he says, “I think as you go forward you’re going to see us doing better and better.”
He sneaks a bit of stump speech into the interview, saying he believes Americans want to hear his message about changing “a grotesque level of income and wealth inequality, a national system for healthcare”.
“Those people are not going to be voting for establishment politics,” he says. “They want real change.”
Dickerson asks about delegates
if you look at Illinois and Missouri, he says, “we came out almost the same with the number of delegates”
“Hillary Clinton has moved over the last 10 months to the positions I’ve been advocating for the last 20 or 30 years,” Sanders says. “Our history in politics is very different and I think the people of this country deserve to know that.”
He says that Clinton is receiving “many millions of dollars through your super Pac, from Wall street, drug companies”. He poses a rhetorical question to voters: “Are you really going to be the agent of change, taking on Wall Street, taking on the moneyed interests?”
“That is an issue that the voters are going to have to decide,” he concludes.
Dickerson asks about delegates again, and whether Sanders is trying to court superdelegates away from Clinton. “The whole concept of superdelegates is problematic,” Sanders says. But he adds: “I think it might be a good idea for superdelegates to listen to the people in their own state.”
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Next up: John Kasich on the CBS show Face the Nation, with host John Dickerson.
Dickerson tells Kasich he needs more than 100% of the remaining delegates in the Republican primary to win the nomination by American votes.
Kasich ignores this: “Nobody’s going to have the delegates they need going to the convention, everyone will fall short.”
He insists the rules and convention process will tilt the scales in his favor: “We got rules as to how many delegates you oughtta get. If you go in way ahead, yeah, you’re likely to get picked.”
He says the delegates will see that it comes down to electability, mostly in Ohio. “Who’s gonna beat Hillary? These guys can’t win Ohio.”
Dickerson: Why don’t you drop out so that Ted Cruz, who’s beating you, has a better shot of stopping Donald Trump?
Kasich: “Why don’t they drop out? I’m the one that can win in the fall.”
He attempts an awkward segue into his stump speech: “I am not in this for some political science game or some calculation.” He seems to mean that he’s not interested in any backroom machinations to stop Trump.
The convention is not “subterfuge”, he says. It’s all part of “the political process” as usual.
Mitch McConnell, meanwhile, has popped up on Fox News Sunday. Ed Helmore was watching as McConnell offered a variation on his theme for the day – the supreme court nomination of judge Merrick Garland ain’t going nowhere just yet:
We need to focus on principle. You have to go back 80 years to find a vacancy that was filled in an election year. The president nominates, we decide to confirm. But the American people need to weigh in, and they’ll do that in November. It’s a long-standing tradition to not confirm supreme court nominees in an election year. Americans are choosing their next president, the next president should chose the nominee.
“We’re not giving lifetime appointments to this president on the way out the door to change the Supreme Court.”
White House chief of staff Denis McDonough responded:
We think it’s clear in the constitution that when there is a vacancy the president proposes a nominee and that’s been practice for decades or centuries. The nominee then goes before meetings and public hearings. Then they go before a vote in the committee and a vote in the Senate. That’s what you have to do. It’s that simple.
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Trump defends manager over video
Stephanopoulos asks Trump about his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, who appeared to yank a protester’s collar at a rally on Saturday.
“I give him credit for having spirit, he wanted them to take down those horrible profanity laced signs,” Trump says. “Security at the arena, the police were a little bit lax,” he goes on.
“They had signs up in that area were horrendous,” he goes on, adding that some used “the ultimate word”. He again defends Lewandowski, who has also been accused of assaulting a reporter. “I will give him credit, spirit. Now, he didn’t touch!”
Stephanopoulos moves on to a related question, about Trump’s suggestion that there will be riots should Republicans at an open convention try to prevent him from winning the nomination. Would he tell his supporters not to riot?
Trump: “I would certainly tell them that. But look, these people are fervent, they want to see positive things.”
He says he wants peace, though he can’t promise it: “I don’t want to see riots, I don’t want to see problems, but you have millions of people your’e talking about.”
“You’re going to have a lot of very unhappy people,” he adds.
Finally, Stephanopoulos asks about Trump’s speech to the pro-Israel group AIPAC, scheduled for Monday. Trump has raised hackles with comments that he would be “neutral” in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“There’s nobody more pro-Israel than I am,” Trump says. “We’ll see what happens. I think making a deal would be in Israel’s interest. I don’t know one Jewish person that doesn’t want to have a deal. A good deal, a proper deal.”
Here is Donald Trump's campaign manager in the Tucson crowd grabbing the collar of a protester. pic.twitter.com/JZ9RntWlHY
— Jacqueline Alemany (@JaxAlemany) March 19, 2016
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Trump blames protesters for violence against them
Donald Trump is the first presidential candidate to appear on ABC’s This Week with host George Stephanopoulos. Trump calls in.
The first question is about violence: what more will you do to stop the attacks against protesters?
Trump begins with a rambling response: “Well it’s not only Tucson, we had a great rally right next to Phoenix, 21,000” people. He alludes to protests in Arizona. “I think it’s really unfair that these really, in many cases professional, in may cases sick, protesters could put cars in a road, blocking in many,” he says. “It’s a very unfair double standard. Why don’t you mention that people were delayed for an hour.”
Stephanopoulos does not point out that a delay for an hour is not tantamount to being punched in the face, but does press Trump on the violence.
“These people are very disruptive people,” Trump says of the protesters. He talks about a demonstrator who was sucker-punched and kicked on the ground. “Well you know he or his partner was wearing a Ku klux Klan outfit, Trump says, although video of the attack shows the protester is wearing an American flag shirt.
“This happened to be an African American man who was very very incensed that someone a protester would be wearing a Ku Klux Klan outfit,” Trump says of the crowd member who attacked the protester.
Stephanopoulos: you seem to be condoning the violence.
“That was a tough thing to watch,” Trump doesn’t answer. He asks why would a protester wear a Ku Klux Klan outfit. “You would’ve seen him just before he went up the stairs him and his partner, one of them” wore the outfit, he insists.
Earlier this month Trump waffled on whether to denounce a former Ku Klux Klan leader and white supremacist groups in general.
We don’t condone violence,” Trump says. “And we have very little violence.” This is a departure from Trump’s earlier claims, after scuffles in Chicago, that his rallies have had no violent incidents.
“At what point do people blame the protesters,” the businessman says, returning to his claim that there’s a double standard. “These are professional agitators. I think that somebody should say that when a road is blocked going into the event.”
He blames “tremendous profanity” on signs for inciting violence. “I think maybe those people have some blame and should suffer some blame also.”
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Republican chair: 'let the convention play out'
Republican party chairman Reince Priebus appears next on the CNN program. Host Dana Bash asks him about violence at Donald Trump rallies.
“No, it’s not the image” that Republicans want to project, Priebus says. “It’s not the image we are projecting, it’s an image that’s been out there unfortunately at some rallies.”
“I would say leave these things up to the professionals,” he says, vaguely. He seems to mean police and private security, which does not get to the heart of the question, about a tone that encourages and condones violence between protesters and supporters.
“Getting involved in confrontations, violence is not the answer, getting involved is not the answer,” he concludes, doing his utmost not to get involved in the question of whether Donald Trump’s campaign manager grabbed a protester a week after allegedly grabbing a reporter.
Bash moves on, to the question of a contested convention, which Priebus last week dubbed “unlikely”.
“When someone’s a little bit short you let the process play out,” the chairman says of the delegate race. “The minority of delegates doesn’t rule for the majority.”
“This is the first time in a long time people actually care about delegate count,” he continues. “The majority of delegates in our party choose the nominee.”
Priebus cites his own experience. “I won on the seventh ballot as chairman,” he says, “I had to fight and fight and fight, but that’s how it works.”
He insists that Trump voters should not feel “disenfranchised”: “in fact they’re empowered by the delegates they receive”.
What about the convention rules? Are Trump fans right to fear some convention jiggery-pokery in favor of a different candidate?
“The 2016 rules committee writes the rules for the 2016 convention,” Priebus says. He clarifies that “the rules committee that was made up of [Mitt] Romney convention” in 2012 will not run the show for this year’s committee, “which’ll largely be made of Trump-Cruz delegates”.
“This is very simple. the delegates get elected, the delegates filled the slots on these many committees,” he says. “These delegates make the decisions on the governance of the convention they’re part of.”
Of particular worry to some non-Trump supporters is a 2012 rule that requires a candidate win eight states for their name to be eligible. Ted Cruz has won seven, John Kasich has won one.
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Bash asks McConnell about the presidential election, noting that the Senate majority leader called Donald Trump last week to ask him to tone it down on his encouragement of violent supporters.
McConnell says he “ought to encourage people to have these debates in a respectful way.”
He dodges on the question of whether he would support Trump, specifically, should he win the nomination. “I intend to support the nominee of our party and we’ll find out who that is in the coming months.”
She asks him about an open convention. What happens if no one acquires the magic 1,237 delegates to secure the nomination on the first ballot?
“I am going to be a delegate from Kentucky, I’m bound on the first ballot,” McConnell says. “If there’s a second ballot I’ll let you know.”
What about Senate races, Bash asks – will Republican senators shy away from Trump for fear of losing their seats?
“No matter who the presidential nominee is,” McConnnell says, “we’re going to run individual races.”
He hints though that yes, senators are ready to steer clear of a nominated Trump: “Senate races are statewide races, you can craft your own message for your own people.”
Senator Mitch McConnell is next up on CNN, speaking about Barack Obama’s supreme court nominee, Merrick Garland – whom McConnel has vowed not to emrace
“A lot of people who think this nominee ought to be decided by the next president” are out there talking, McConnell says, referring to himself.
He asks who should fill the vacancy on the court: “a lame duck president on the way out the door or a president we’re in the process of electing right now”.
“What’s the tradition?” McConnell asks. He says it’s been 80 years since the US has seen an analogous vacancy, and that “you have to go back to 1888 to find the last time a vacancy created in a presidential year was filled by a senate that was a different party by the president.”
The fact-checkers at Politifact have found these claims wanting: “‘Tradition’ [is] not consistent with judicial history,” they wrote. “Should Republican lawmakers refuse to begin the process of confirming an Obama nomination, it would be the first time in modern history.”
McConnell casts a little conservative aspersion at Garland: “even though Barack Obama calls him a moderate he’s opposed by the NRA,” he says, adding that the NFIB also opposes Garland and the New York Times says he’d make the court more liberal.
“I can’t imagine that a Republican majority congress, in a lame-duck session after the American people have spoken,” would confirm a nominee, he concludes. He says he’s 100% unwilling to take a hearing on any nominee.
“This is not about this particular judge, this is about who should make the appointment.”
The Obama administration has argued that the American people have already decided who should make the appointment, in that they elected Barack Obama to a second four-year-term.
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Kasich is onto the question of an open convention again. He gets tetchy, and takes credit for already preventing Trump’s clinched nomination because he won Ohio.
“I didn’t win Ohio because of any calculation,” he says. “You gotta get to the magic number to bet the nominee.”
He says the Republican party has gone into an open convention 10 times, and “only three times has the person gone into the convention with the most delegates won.”
Bash asks him about Trump’s warning that there will be riots if he doesn’t get the nomination at the Cleveland convention. “I don’t think that kind of language is appropriate to talk about violence and rioting,” Kasich says.
He adds that there have been “outrageous” threats against Donald Trump’s family, which he says “they” – it’s not clear whom he’s talking about – “have no right” to make.
Finally, Bash asks him about confetti. Kasich had a lot of confetti at his Ohio victory party, the only victory party his campaign has held in more than 20 states and territories. Kasich says his “advance man” screwed up, but that he’s still trying to be a good leader for the country.
“I’m just a weak flawed man like everybody else but I’m going to do the best I can.”
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Ohio Governor John Kasich is first on the docket this morning, with Dana Bash on CNN’s State of the Union.
She asks him how on earth he hopes to win the nomination when he’s so far behind in the delegate race – it’s mathematically impossible for him to win 1,237 delegates that would secure the nomination.
Kasich: “I don’t think anybody’s going to have enough delegates, Dana, to tell you the truth.”
He says the convention is “an extension” of the electoral process. He gets rhetorical about an open convention: “Who actually could be president of the United States and do a good job? When the delegates think about that I think we’ll be in a pretty good place.”
Bash insists it’s about “gobbling up as many delegates as you can”, at this point, and asks whether Kasich will at all coordinate with Ted Cruz to prevent Donald Trump from clinching the nomination on the first ballot of the convention.
Kasich says it’s just not going to happen. “We’re going to an open, multi-ballot convention, and the convention is an extension of what we’re going through right now.”
He says he’s tired of all the hysteria about preventing a candidate Trump.
“Everybody needs to take a little chill pill, to tell you the truth.”
Then he says he’ll listen to Cruz, if the senator wants to talk about coordination, but that doesn’t mean he’ll do anything about it. “We always talk if somebody wants to call and discuss things,” Kasich says. “It’s a mission for all of us.”
Hello and welcome to our live coverage of the 2016 campaign, three days out from primaries in Arizona and Utah and the Democratic caucus in Idaho.
Republican frontrunner Donald Trump is – again – facing up to violence at his campaign events. In Tucson, Arizona on Saturday a protester being escorted out of a venue was sucker-punched in the face by a Trump supporter, who then jumped over the fallen man and kicked him on the ground.
At the same event, in a video captured by a reporter and posted online, Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski appeared to yank a protester’s collar. The Trump campaign denied that the video shows Lewandowski grabbing the man, and spokesperson Hope Hicks said: “Mr Trump does not condone violence at his rallies.”
A little over a week ago a reporter filed a criminal complaint against Lewandowski, alleging that he grabbed her with enough force to bruise her arms, a photo of which she published online. Lewandowski and the campaign have denied those charges as well.
Trump has roughly 250 more delegates than Senator Ted Cruz, who along with Ohio governor John Kasich is hoping to keep the businessman from winning the 1,237 delegates that would deliver the Republican nomination. Kasich has about 143 delegates. Cruz is looking to beat Trump in Utah, where his evangelical bona fides have a ready audience with the dominant Mormon population, and where favorite son Mitt Romney has excoriated the frontrunner for “racism, misogyny” and other wrongs.
Cruz is also trying to make a dent in Trump’s delegate wins in Arizona, where immigration is a central issue and anti-Trump protests resulted in blocked roads and several arrests on Saturday. The self-described billionaire (he has not released his tax returns to prove the point) has warned of riots, should the Republican party try to block his nomination at the convention this summer.
On the Democratic side of the race, underdog Bernie Sanders has been evangelizing an antipodal message along the US-Mexican border, preaching inclusion and ridiculing Trump’s proposal to deport 11 million people who lack immigration papers. Sanders, too, is trying to steal delegates away from the frontrunner, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who has an estimated 467 “superdelegates” to Sanders’ 26.
Clinton has slowly started to turn toward the general election and her likely foe: the tangerine tycoon who led the campaign against five young black men over a rape they didn’t commit; who told a judge one of his properties is worth $48m less than he told the public; and who asked his aides to trawl the press, daily, for any mention of his name so that he could read it.
Some other news sure to make it to the candidates this morning:
- Barack Obama’s historic trip to Cuba, the first presidential visit to Havana since Calvin Coolidge stopped by 88 years ago, and the culmination of extraordinary efforts to thaw the cold war relations between the US and the Castro regime.
- The trip is also the latest step toward a new age of the Americas, coinciding with major changes in Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela and Argentina.
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The Senate showdown over Obama’s nominee to the supreme court, the well loved judge Merrick Garland. Republicans want to block any nominee, but are hard-pressed with Garland, a moderate judge who has won the high praise of Republicans, including the top senator on the judiciary committee.
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