This blog has now closed, but we’ll have live coverage of tonight’s Democratic town hall forum right here.
Summary
We’re going to close our blog now – although Paul Owen will be back soon to live-blog the Democratic town hall event in Ohio.
It has been a day of anticlimax on the campaign trail, which given what went before on Friday and Saturday was absolutely and entirely a good thing.
Donald Trump toured the talk shows to insist the violent confrontations and chaos surrounding his recent events were not remotely his fault; later he read an obscure 1970s soul song as a poem. So that was new.
John Kasich toured the same talk shows to insist he will win Ohio and then march – with sunny disposition – all the way to the White House. And in Florida, Marco Rubio tried to look on the bright side of what seems the impending end of his campaign, helped by a heckler who claimed the senator had stolen his girlfriend, which if nothing else gave everyone concerned a much-needed laugh.
On the Democratic side of things, Bernie Sanders did what he usually does on Sundays: spoke to rapturous crowds after telling the talk shows he will not give in to Hillary Clinton and will take his momentum into the northern states at play on “Mega Tuesday”. Yes, we’re calling it that. Hillary – a talk show no-show – just campaigned.
Here’s Oliver Laughland’s wrap of the day and the weekend. Until later.
With the fate of his presidential campaign two days away, Marco Rubio returned to a retirement community in The Villages in central Florida on Sunday, to urge voters not to give in to the politics of fear.
Faced with defeat in his home state on Tuesday at the hands of Donald Trump, the senator said violence and altercations at the Republican frontrunner’s rallies presented “third-world images” to the nation.
“Embrace what made us great to begin with,” Rubio said. “Embrace leaders who do not ask you to give them your vote on fear and hopelessness.”
The senator was warmly received by the crowd of roughly 400, with an overflow outside. The retirees, most of them old enough to be Rubio’s parents, were also receptive to his criticisms of Trump and the business mogul’s rhetoric.
Rubio took several shots at his rival, emphasizing in particular his “new brand of leadership that isn’t leadership at all … that says, ‘Yes, get angry.’”
“Do we really want to live in a country where Americans hate each other?” Rubio said. “If we continue on the road we are on right now, we are going to fracture at the seams.”
The senator has been barnstorming his home state for more than a week in the hopes of salvaging his bid for the Republican nomination. He sunk to new lows in recent primary contests, failing to secure any delegates in several states.
Polling in Florida shows an uphill climb for Rubio, who is trailing Trump by double digits in some surveys and gaining ground in others. A loss would almost certainly force him out of the race.
Rubio placed some of the blame with the media, saying it “covers politics as entertainment instead of serious discourse”.
The rally, while mostly uneventful, did include one moment of levity shortly after Rubio took the stage.
A young man interrupted to complain that Rubio had tried to steal his girlfriend, alleging she was so charmed when she saw the senator in New Hampshire that she no longer looked at him the same way.
The crowd rose to Rubio’s defense, chanting “Marco! Marco” as the man, who continued to disrupt, was escorted out by security.
A bemused Rubio laughed off the incident but didn’t skip a beat in contrasting himself to Trump.
“We don’t rough up hecklers at our rallies,” he said.
Around the Republican trail, Marco Rubio in Florida.
Rubio now paraphrasing Shylock. "I'm a man. You cut me, I'll bleed. You hurt me, I'll feel pain."
— DENALI (@timothypmurphy) March 13, 2016
Ted Cruz in North Carolina: “gentleman, start your engines.”
Ted Cruz on stage at last in North Carolina pic.twitter.com/972s3U9Rne
— Ben Jacobs (@Bencjacobs) March 13, 2016
And Donald Trump in the sky on the way to Boca Raton.
Dark clouds have formed over the scene of the Trump rally in Boca Raton. pic.twitter.com/KAZ7PRunAm
— Olivia Nuzzi (@Olivianuzzi) March 13, 2016
And outside the Cincinnati venue, with Megan Carpentier, as the rally inside ends.
A middle-aged woman, with a piece of wet neon poster board reading “Trump is Hitler” on one side and “Hillary Clinton 2016” on the other, has walked up into the crowd of Trump supporters.
She started yelling at another middle-aged woman, in English about Trump being “a fascist”, and in Spanish seemingly about the candidate’s failure to support issues important to the African-American, Latino and LGBT communities.
The protester was quickly surrounded by Trump fans, waving flags and umbrellas at her, as one man scribbled on the back of her sign. The 30-some people shouted “USA, USA, USA” and she quieted, holding her sign aloft.
“Hillary’s a murderer,” someone shouted.
“Don’t touch me!” the protester said, as two people walked around her waving shirts.
“No one wants to touch you,” a young man yelled.
“Maybe if someone did, you wouldn’t be here!” another jeered from the crowd.
“Build the wall! Build the wall!” the crowd chanted.
“Hillary kills babies!” yelled another woman, and the crowd started shouting Trump’s name as a police officer finally came over to ask the Clinton supporter to move to the designated protest area.
“It’s our party,” another guy said, “Go back to yours over there.”
Two police officers politely walked her back. Someone tried to get the crowd to sing “Nah nah nah nah, hey hey hey, goodbye”, but nobody else took it up.
Updated
Trump is taking questions. Someone in the audience asks him “on what day will you send Hillary Clinton to prison?”
This gets a huge ovation.
The candidate looks amused, but offers a relatively cagey answer, by his standards. He says he wants to beat her in the general election and then he’ll see about criminal charges.
He then rambles a bit about how the US protects Germany and Japan in exchange “for peanuts”.
Then it’s on to motorcycles. “Motorcycle guys love Trump,” he says. “And I’m not too much on the motorcycles, but every place I go there’s hundreds of guys on motorcycles, and they say, ‘I love you, Mr Trump.’”
“They want to see a strong country,” he goes on, and “strong infrastructure”.
“I mean if I’m driving a motorcycle I don’t want to be driving over potholes,” he adds.
“The motorcycle people love Donald Trump.”
A Native American woman asks Trump whether, “after you take the oath” of office, he’ll apologize for the many broken treaties and crimes against indigenous people that litter American history.
“Well I’ll certainly look into it,” Trump says. “You know I haven’t been big on apologizing.”
The crowd laughs.
Updated
Megan Carpentier is still outside the Cincinnati rally, where pro- and anti-Trump bands are acting up.
As Trump spoke in the venue, roving groups of Trump supporters and protestors milled outside the event, mingling and exchanging insults.
In the designated protest area, a group of young people yelled “Dump Trump!” at passersby, who sometimes responded with insults. “Fuck you, you commie! Go back to Africa!” yelled one, at the most vociferous protestor.
“Fuck you, you’re the one voting for a commie!” he yelled back.
A group of very young men in American flag clothes rolled up and started blowing an air horn at them, to jeers from the protestors: “Ooh, your mommy bought you an air horn!”
The woman who’d harassed me pointed at the kids with an air horn and laughed.
Trump is on the stage in Cincinnati, where he waits for protesters to be escorted out and his supporters boo the demonstrators.
Once they’re out, they chant: “Trump! Trump! Trump!”
The candidate kicks off by saying that his wife and daughter asked him not to engage with rivals during the last Republican debate. They asked him to be presidential, Trump says.
“I said, ‘I can’t do that. When they go after you I have to go back at them.’”
He criticizes Ohio governor John Kasich, saying, “he ran Lehman Brothers into the ground” and almost destroyed the world’s economy. Kasich made hundreds of thousands while with the financial firm until it collapsed in 2008 – along with the US economy – but Kasich was not at all a central player in running the company.
Then it’s on to boasting about elections. “I won evangelicals the day after the pope scolded me,” he says, apparently having missed the 16th-century religious revolution and counter-revolution that separated Protestants from Catholics, and the subsequent centuries of American revivalism that created the loose group of sects we call “evangelicals” today.
“I said, ‘the pope!?’ I said, ‘well that’s a big problem.’ I said, ‘I like the pope.’”
He’s talking about Pope Francis’s remarks that Trump’s desire to keep out immigrants is “not Christian”. Trump is Presbyterian, and the head of his church also disagrees with him on the issue.
Then Trump says Pete Rose, the disgraced former athlete who bet on games as a baseball player, “should be in the Hall of Fame”.
Updated
Donald Trump has just begun a rally in Cincinnati, Ohio, where my colleague Megan Carpentier is speaking with the fans and protesters outside.
Though Secret Service shut the doors at 1.30pm and Donald Trump didn’t arrive at Cincinnati’s Savannah Center until nearly 3pm, hundreds of people stood out in the intermittent rain just to cheer his arrival.
From under an awning where people were sheltering from the rain – by two men holding a banner reading “THE SILENT MAJORITY IS PISSED!” for attendees to add their signatures and a large Donald Trump impersonators – a yell went up when the motorcade was spotted and bedraggled fans rushed towards the entrance, slipping in the mud and jostling for position.
“Trump! Trump! Trump!” some young men shouted, as people held cell phones and selfies sticks over the heads of the crowd and “The Donald”, as one older lady called him, waved at his fans before walking. Inside to take the stage.
Pictures snapped, some people headed for their cars, while others retreated to the few dry spots to wait it out.
Meanwhile, vendors selling both Trump-specific and general conservative swag worked the remaining crowd. “Oh, we’re local vendors,” one leathered older man said. “We offered him a donation, but he said he don’t want our money, just asked for our votes.
“He don’t need my money anyway.”
Meanwhile, a short, middle-aged woman in a Trump shirt followed a trio of younger folks – a white woman in a hoodie, a white man in a blue T-shirt and duck camouflage cap (a popular Ohio print) and a black man with short dreadlocks – and shouted “Yeah, you better put your hoodie up!” at the girl.
As I looked up, she glared at me, too. “How’d you get in here first?” she demanded. I smiled, and told her I hadn’t gotten in anywhere, as I was stuck outside in the rain. Satisfied, she wandered off.
Updated
Things are getting weird in Boca Raton, Florida, where the Daily Beast’s Olivia Nuzzi is reporting for a Trump rally set to begin this evening.
Scene from America, 2016: a woman on a scooter chases a man, dressed as Donald Trump's giant penis, around a park.
— Olivia Nuzzi (@Olivianuzzi) March 13, 2016
Meanwhile, hamming it up on the campaign trail, Bernie Sanders has a surprise guest in St Louis:
WATCH: @DannyDeVito surprises @BernieSanders rally in St. Louis: "We need you, Obi-Wan!" https://t.co/4RUewIWMHThttps://t.co/SvbyJCUt5S
— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) March 13, 2016
Kasich earlier today dismissed the fact that his name is not on the ballot in Pennsylvania – he did not have enough signatures at the deadline – as “political gibberish”.
Someone who knows his gibberish has seized on it, though.
Because Gov. Kasich cannot run in the state of Pennsylvania-he cannot win the nomination- & should not be allowed to compete in Ohio on Tue.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 13, 2016
Ohio and Florida are the states making headlines this week, since they represent John Kasich and Marco Rubio’s last chances to make a dent in Donald Trump’s delegate lead and revive their flagging campaigns. But Ted Cruz, who’s about 100 delegates behind Trump, is aiming at the other states, my colleague Ben Jacobs reports from Concord, North Carolina.
Ted Cruz will appear in a drag racing venue in suburban Charlotte on Sunday afternoon as part of a conservative extravaganza sponsored by the pro-Cruz Super Pac Keep The Promise.
While the winner-take-all states of Florida and Ohio have consumed much of the media attention regarding Tuesday’s Republican contests, the delegate-rich states of Illinois, Missouri and North Carolina also hold GOP primaries. The Tarheel State is the only contest on Tuesday that is entirely proportional. For every 1.39% of the vote that a GOP candidate receives from North Carolina Republicans, he’ll get one of the 72 delegates up for grabs.
The program, which culminates in an appearance from Cruz, features appearances from a variety of his supporters, including former rival Carly Fiorina, talkshow host Glenn Beck and retired general Jerry Boykin, best known for making a variety of anti-Muslim comments.
Recent polls of North Carolina show Donald Trump with a double digit lead over Cruz in the state.
Updated
A video by MSNBC host Rachel Maddow is proving popular this weekend on the web. Much like HBO host John Oliver in a recent video, Maddow has a target – Donald Trump – although she does not attack the Republican frontrunner with humour. Maddow attacks him with barely contained anger.
Speaking on Friday night, after violence broke out around a Trump rally in Chicago which was postponed when infiltrated by protesters, Maddow says: “This has turned out to be a night that may go down in history as one of the darker moments in American major politics.
“I think we got here by deliberate means,” she says. “I don’t think we got here by accident.”
Maddow then notes recent unrest over police killings of African Americans including Michael Brown, Laquan McDonald and Tamir Rice, and the cities where they happened.
She says: “So the St Louis area, Chicago, Cleveland. Those are not the only American cities that have proven to be real tinderboxes around issues of race and racism and policing and violence.
“But those three happen to be the three most recent stops on the itinerary of Republican presidential contender Donald Trump, whose rallies have featured racially charged incidents of violence for months now.”
Maddow accuses Trump of stoking “bloodlust” with “half-serious calls for a tougher America where there are more beatings and anti-Trump protesters should fear for their lives”.
“As he heads into these tinderbox cities,” she continues, “I just want you to watch how that part of candidate Trump’s rhetoric has escalated.”
Maddow then presents a chronological, date-stamped sequence of utterances by Trump which she says represent “a deliberate act which created what happened tonight in Chicago”.
“It really is like nothing we’ve ever seen in mainstream American politics before,” she says, comparing Trump’s rhetoric and the behaviour of crowds at his rallies to “skinhead events” in the 1980s.
The video sequence begins with Trump in Cedar Rapids, Iowa on 1 February, asking fans: “If you see someone getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would you?”
It ends with footage from the Fayetteville, North Carolina rally this week in which a protester being led out was sucker-punched by a Trump supporter.
Maddow then shows Trump speaking in St Louis earlier on Friday, at a rally he was advised by local officials to cancel, due to the threat of protests, but did not.
“There are no consequences to protesting anymore,” Trump says from the podium, as protesters are taken out. “Our country has to toughen up, folks, we have to toughen up. These people are bringing us down … these people are so bad for our country, you have no idea, folks. You have no idea.”
To a raucous reception, he adds: “Go home to mommy. Go home and get a job.”
Maddow concludes: “If you want to know what led up to Chicago today, that was Donald Trump’s display of leadership and calming the waters.”
Over footage of the violence in Chicago, she adds: “This is the work of an American presidential candidate who deliberately made this happen.
“And the Republican party is going to nominate this man for president.”
Updated
On the Democratic side of the election, Bernie Sanders’ campaign has taken Hillary Clinton to task for questioning where the senator (then a congressman) was during her 1990s campaign to reform healthcare.
His deputy communications director has dug up a personal note from Clinton (then the first lady), thanking Sanders for his help.
"with thanks for your commitment to real health care access for all Americans" - 1993 @amychozick pic.twitter.com/HDyUMtiNph
— arianna jones (@ariannaijones) March 12, 2016
Donald Trump does not believe all the things he says, according to Ben Carson, the Republican’s erstwhile rival, who sat down with the Hill for an interview this weekend.
The news site asked the retired neurosurgeon why he would endorse the “very cerebral” billionaire last week, and Carson said needed to talk with the man himself to answer that question.
“I needed to know that he could listen to other people, that he could change his opinions, and that some of the more outlandish things that he’s said, that he didn’t really believe those things,” Carson said.
When asked which statements Trump might back away from, Carson demurred.
“I’ll let him talk about that because I don’t think it’s fair for me to relay a private conversation,” he said.
You can read my colleague Mona Chalabi’s take on the importance of endorsements down through the link below.
Updated
Trump reads 70s song as terrorism fable
Trump ends his rally with an appropriately surreal choice: “a song” that is also “a poem” – about “terrorism”. “Just listen, you’re going to love this.”
“On her way to work one morning,
Down the path along the lake,
A tender hearted women,
Saw a poor half frozen snake.
“His pretty colored skin had been all frosted with the dew
I’ll take care of you
Take me in oh tender woman,
Take me in for heaven’s sake
Sighed the broken snake.
“She wrapped him up all cozy,
In a curvature of silk,
And then laid him by the fireside,
With some honey and some milk.
The woman finds the snake “totally revived”. She “clutched it to her bosom / You’re so beautiful she cried.”
The twist: “instead of saying thank you, that snake gave her vicious bite.”
“Oh shut up silly woman,
Said the reptile with a grin,
You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in.”
He didn’t write the poem. He urges the crowd to vote. “Right? Does everybody sort of get it?”
*The poem is actually the Al Wilson 70s song “The Snake,” my colleague Jon Swaine points out. It’s not about terrorism. Get it?
Updated
“Me, the lobbyists won’t even call,” the billionaire rambles on. He says that his daughter Ivanka and his wife Melania often tell him he needs to act more “presidential”.
“I don’t care if it’s not presidential,” he says. He’s talking about how he has harsh words for businesses who plan to move manufacturing outside the United States. “I want Carrier not to leave our country. I want Nabisco not to leave our country. I want Ford not to leave our country.”
He’s back onto trade deals, referring to the Obama administration’s signature agreement with Pacific nations: “TPP doesn’t even discuss monetary devaluation, and that’s the key weapon, that’s why we’re [losing to] China.”
“We can’t lose $500bn a year to China. We can’t lose a fortune to Japan.”
He says a trade war is better “than losing all of this money”. The US “rebuilt” China, according to the billionaire. “I love China. I have many Chinese friends. They can’t believe they got away with this.”
A fair amount of self-praise and vague promises follow, in typical stream-of-consciousness fashion and non sequitur flourishes, eg Trump’s assertion that he would have been given “the electric chair” were he to use “the F-bomb”.
The Republican avoids using the word “ass” because, he says, the press doesn’t want him to. He could also have used “keister”, “bum”, “bottom” or a thesaurus.
He eventually trots out a man wearing a shirt that says “legal immigrant for Trump”.
The man is a little emotional – “I’m surprised I’m up here” – “I’m here because I’m agitated that the media does not separate legal immigration from illegal.”
He shakes Trump’s hand and they have a little hug. His name is inaudible to the microphone.
Before long he’s talking about products made in Japan, and how products need to be made in America again. Trump has for years produced clothing in China.
“We all like sports and we love sports, right?”
The crowd likes that Trump likes sports. Then the billionaire mocks Ohio governor John Kasich for saying he watches golf.
“He said, ‘honestly, I don’t watch channel except for one show, I only watch the Golf Channel.’ I don’t want a guy who watches the Golf Channel and nothing else!”
Then it’s the Trump wall. “It’s going to be a real wall.”
Another protester shouts something. “Hell-oh! Go back home darling,” is Trump’s reaction. “See, nobody gets hurt.”
“Nobody’s been hurt,” he again says, falsely. He admits: “We’re a little bit rough.”
Then he says everyone who says otherwise is dishonest.
Speaking of golf and dishonesty, Trump has valued one of his golf courses at wildly different prices in separate documents. He told the FEC that one of his New York clubs is worth $50m, and told a judge overseeing a tax lawsuit that it’s only worth $1.4m – as part of his argument that he should not pay so much for it.
You can read more of my colleague Jon Swaine’s investigation through the link below.
Updated
Some protesters interrupt the speech. They’re chanting something inaudible to the microphones and waving at least one banner that says “black lives matter.”
“Get ‘em out! Send ‘em back to Bernie!” Trump shouts. “Get them out of here!”
“You see where they place themselves, right in front of the cameras. You see that? That’s all they care about,” says the former reality TV host, who appeared on four cable TV shows this morning. “Disgusting.”
“Get ‘em out! Now!”
The crowd is chanting “USA!” for no particular reason. Trump goes with it: “USA! USA! I love it.”
Now he’s talking about Christmas. He says it’s going to be back this December. The crowd cheers. Then it’s Ted Cruz: “a good debater but he’s a bad talker.” The crowd boos.
Updated
The billionaire broaches the protester incidents at his events. “Usually it’s staged, but they say something, they’re stopped. We have fun. We have fun.”
“You know how many people have been injured at our shows? Nobody. Nobody,” he says, falsely. In the last week alone a reporter showed visible bruises (she accused Trump’s campaign manager), a protester was bloodied in St Louis, and two police officers were injured in Chicago.
Trump allude to a protester who was assaulted, it’s not clear whom, saying “the person was violent.”
“He had a voice like Pavarati, and when we hit back we’re the bad ones!” he says. “I don’t hear their voice, I only hear our people’s voice saying ‘there they are, there they are.’”
Some of the protesters “are so mean, so loud, so vicious, they stop us from really our first amendment rights, right?”
But he praises “our people [who] started swinging back”. His supporters would be reviled if they protested a Democratic candidate, Trump says. “You go to one of these rallies, and you protest? Oh, you’re in trouble. They’ll lock you up for the rest of your life, they’ll give you the electric chair.”
“We’re not provoking, we all want peace.”
Then he questions whether Barack Obama wrote any of the books he’s authored. “They say he wrote the first book, who knows if it’s true.”
The sentences only have tangential links to one another. It’s logorrhea. Millions of people. John Kasich is terrible. Bernie Sanders is fading. We’re very disenfranchised. One woman in Tennessee, 93-years-old, she never voted. Trade deals. The Democrats are down 35%, there’s no spirit.
Trump is holding a rally in Bloomington, Illinois – he steps off his private jet and waltzes over to the stage under a giant “Trump” umbrella done up like the American flag.
“Do we love Illinois? We love Illinois.” He immediately starts talking about his “big, big building in Chicago”.
Lots of “big” so far. “We have a big week coming up, we have a big century coming up.”
He gets into the “terrible” deal with “terror nation” Iran. Then “your taxes are through the roof, your companies are leaving you. You’ve got nothing going!”
“You guys are one of the big factors. Ohio’s not doing well. Y’know Ohio likes to talk about how everything’s stabilized.” Trump says the state raised real estate taxes so high that people are “choking”.
He’s talking about Ohio governor John Kasich, whom he faces off there on Tuesday’s election, and about trade deals supported by the governor. So far a pretty standard Trump speech: everything is very gloomy but we’re going to bring jobs back to America.
Updated
“At the end of the day, in any campaign, responsibility starts at the top,” Ted Cruz tells NBC’s Chuck Todd. The Texas senator appeared last on Meet the Press.
“It is not beneficial when you have a presidential candidate like Donald Trump telling his supporters, “punch that guy in the face,” Cruz says.
Todd: is Trump responsible for the tone of his rallies and Donald Trump alone?
Cruz repeats his lines from earlier this morning: “Listen, the protesters have no right to engage in violence. They have no right to threaten violence. And these protesters, whether it’s Black Lives Matter or Bernie Sanders protesters, who are coming in just trying to shout down any speaker, that’s not free speech. The first amendment gives you a right to speak, but it doesn’t give you a right to silence others.”
He says the protesters are acting “abusively and wrong” – but he sideswipes Trump again with the line that “responsibility starts at the top”.
“And it is not beneficial when you have a presidential candidate like Donald Trump telling his supporters, ‘punch that guy in the face.’ We ought to have a president who brings us together, who doesn’t seek to divide us. We’ve seen a president dividing us for seven years. We don’t want to see that going forward.”
He then lumps Trump together with Barack Obama: “It’s very much the same. They’re both engaging in demagoguery.”
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.
Violence has no place in our politics. We should use our words and deeds to bring Americans together. pic.twitter.com/FofjognpIA
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) March 12, 2016
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.
literally standing right behind her. https://t.co/B2cvs4UNth https://t.co/oVA6WccMmZ pic.twitter.com/QeKLnBG337
— mike casca (@cascamike) March 12, 2016
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 speechwriter for the billionaire’s campaign.
Updated
Odd!
Gov.Kasich of Ohio just stated on a morning show that he doesn't watch politics or anything on television, he only watches the @GolfChannel
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 13, 2016
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 Ohio and 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.
Trump: I'm just the messenger … for the internet
Todd asks Trump about his false accusation of terrorist links to a protester who rushed the stage at a recent rally.
Trump pleads total ignorance: “What do I know? All I know is what’s on the internet.”
He says he saw a photo of the protester “dragging the American flag” and that made him very unhappy, but effectively blames the internet for the erroneous claim about the protester.
The reason there tension at my rallies is these people are sick and tired of what’s happening in our country.” He rambles about trade deals, about the terrorist group Isis, about the lack of wage increases, etc.
The billionaire claims that he hasn’t incited any anger at all. It was there when he found it.
“The people are angry about that, they’re not angry about what I’m saying. I’m just the messenger,” he says. “I’m just expressing my opinion. What’ve I said that’s wrong?”
Todd does not rattle off any of the many claims that fact-checkers have found the candidate to have lied about or fudged the truth. Trump has a 70% “false” and “pants-on-fire” rating for telling the truth, according to the fact-checkers at Politifact.
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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.
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John Kasich is up on the ABC show next, and he tells host George Stephanopoulos that he won’t get “into the mud” with Donald Trump. Again he declines to go after Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric except in the broadest way.
“It’s all silly rhetoric,” he says of the criticisms that have ricocheted around the party in the last week.
Stephanopoulos asks the Ohio governor about whether he has a real chance to win the Republican nomination even if he beats Trump. Kasich doesn’t have enough votes to appear on the ballot for Pennsylvania, for instance, an important state with 56 delegates at stake.
“That’s all a bunch of political gibberish too,” Kasich says, without denying that his name is not on the ballot there. “We’re fine in Pennsylvania, we’re fine, this’ll all be resolved here soon.”
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.”
Ted Cruz is next on the ABC show This Week, where host George Stephanopoulos asks him to clarify: you believe Donald Trump encourages violence?
Let’s be clear the protesters were in the wrong,” Cruz begins. “when you try to shut down and shout down speech, that’s not what the first amendment allows.”
“Responsibility starts at the top and it’s not beneficial when you have a candidate tell his protesters, punch that guy in the face,” he says. “We need a candidate who respects the people, even engages the protesters with respect.”
“We can disagree and we can disagree forcefully while still respecting each other and engaging in insults and vulgarity.”
Stephanopoulos asks whether the provocations by Trump are meant to get out his voters.
“I don’t know if it’s his strategy or not,” Cruz says, though he admits that Trump’s default position is “simply to use angry rhetoric, often to engage in insults, often to curse and yell, and that’s not a productive solution.”
He says he understands the frustration and angers of partisans for Trump, who’re “angry with politicians who’ve lied to us”, but, he says, “Donald has been enmeshed in that Washington corruption for 40 years”.
NB: the first amendment has no restrictions on the volume of your voice.
Here’s Donald Trump on Fox News Sunday, from Chicago before a scheduled rally in Illinois, to be followed by rallies in Ohio and Florida. Does he take any responsibility for violence at his events, Chris Wallace asks.
“First of all I disagree totally, Chris, with what you said.”
Well, there’s that.
There’s also the usual procession of vaguely linked buzzwords: “huge crowds”, “thousands”, “the biggest”, “nobody hurt”, “protesters come”, “bad dudes”, “they’re swinging”, “nobody’s been hurt in the last couple of months”.
He is asked about the infamous sucker punch at a rally in North Carolina earlier this week. Does that have a place in America?
“Not it doesn’t,” says Trump. “But the kid did stick up a finger right in someone’s face and this man had had enough.”
That would be the man who subsequently said “we might have to kill” the protester he had just punched, next time.
Again, Trump diverts the interview off into a litany of familiar campaign complaints: trade, the treatment of veterans, China, Mexico. “A big portion of this country is fed up,” he says. “They’re angry, they’re not angry people but they’re angry now.”
And what about his own condoning of violence from the podium? Wallace plays him a selection of such taunts.
The first one, Trump says, was an appeal for help from his crowd because the secret service said two people in the crowd had tomatoes “and being hit in the face by tomatoes is not so good, OK”.
Wallace, normally one of the more incisive US political interviewers, laughs and moves on to the next question.
John Kasich is the last candidate to appear on the CNN program, where he incongruously holds back on denouncing Trump’s language, as the other candidates have done.
“There’s no question Donald Trump has created a toxic atmosphere, pitting people against each other,” Kasich says. “He needs to back off of this and being more aspirational.”
He says his own rallies are “aspirational”. “I don’t watch Turmp rallies” or the news, he goes on. “I basically watch the golf channel when I’m traveling, believe it or not, but when I saw the violence in Chicago I had enough.”
Kasich also rejects the criticisms of free trade agreements from Trump and Bernie Sanders, saying they’re not practical: “we’re not going to lock the doors or pull down the blinds and tell the rest of the world to go away.”
Tapper asks Kasich about his history with Wall Street – he spent seven years with Lehman Brothers, where he made hundreds of thousands of dollars until the firm collapsed in 2008 and took the world economy down with it. Who do you blame for the economic collapse, Tapper asks.
“I think there was greed on Wall Street, no doubt about it,” Kasich says. Then he doesn’t answer the question. He says critics and financiers both should find religion, and trust the invisible hand of the market God.
“Get a little bit of morality, folks, and realize that free enterprise is great but it has to have a moral underpinning.”
Nobody mentions that religion has existed in myriad forms for thousands of years, always, and often quite compatibly, with greed.
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Rubio: 'it's hard to justify Republican pledge to family'
“We need to wake up,” Rubio says. “This is really going to do damage to America.”
“There are people out there that are unbalanced there are people out there who don’t have control of themselves we don’t know what they will do.”
Rubio is not yet willing to say he will not support Trump, should the billionaire win the nomination. But he gets very close to saying it.
“I’m not prepared to say something different today other than to say I hope we can avoid that,” he says. “It’s getting harder every day to justify that statement to myself, to my children, and to my family and to the people that support me.”
The election has already had extraordinary damage, Rubio says.
“This is not going to end well one way or another. He’s going to be the nominee and he’s going to lose, or he’s going to throw this party into disarray … if it crumbles or divides or splits apart it’s going to be very difficult to hold [conservative] views.”
Trump’s very suggestions challenge America’s founding principles, Rubio says. “We have a president. The president is an American citizen … the president works for the people, not the people for the president … he’s going to singlehandedly do this and do that, without regard for whether it’s legal or not.”
He even holds back on blaming Bernie Sanders or the protesters – though he does say, without evidence, that some of them may have been paid. “I don’t agree with them going and thinking they can shut down a rally,” he says, “but [Trump] wants to deflect and distract.”
Rubio even turns his ire toward the media, saying that they’ve given wall-to-wall coverage to Trump’s outrageous statements for ratings. “We have we contributed, to this culture that has turned American politics into the equivalent of the comments sections in these blogs, where presidential candidates are now basically Twitter trolls.”
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Rubio: Trump threatens our republic
Marco Rubio is now on the CNN, where he sounds exhausted and genuinely alarmed at the turn the presidential election has taken.
“All the gates of civility have been blown apart,” he says. “This is not about political correctness, this is about rules of civility.”
He says he’s “very concerned” about the chances someone gets seriously hurt or even killed because of Trump’s language. “We don’t know what’s going to happen next here. We’ve reached the point if they don’t agree with you that they can get angry at you, that you’re a bad and evil person.”
“Do we really want to live in a country where everybody hates each other? Because we disagree about the role of government, or the tax rate … we end up hating each other? Cause that’s what it feels like.”
He says he’s “so tired of arguing” and screaming with other Americans, and hearing “’you’re a bad person, you’re an evil person.”
Rubio goes on to say that Trump’s language, telling his supporters that they can “basically beat up the protesters, beat up the hecklers” and he’ll pay legal fees, are becoming incredibly dangerous.
“There are people out there who are not balanced, people out there who are not completely in control of themselves, and they hear something like this from a leader and you don’t know what they’re going to do.”
He goes on: “it’s reckless and it’s dangerous, and I hope people wake up on time and they realize what’s happening here … Without it getting to levels of violence and anger.”
He alludes to “images of Americans now literally at each other’s throats”, the Trump supporter who suckerpunched a protester and then said he might kill someone next time, Trump’s invented story about a general who dipped bullets into pig’s blood, his suggestion that one protester had links to Isis.
The senator frames Trump’s chaotic movement in the strongest possible terms:.“We’re going to lose our republic,” he says. “It looks like something out of the third world.”
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Tapper also briefly asks Sanders about Hillary Clinton’s brief praise for the late Nancy Reagan, whom she said started a “national conversation” on HIV/Aids – and then apologized for the comment, given the former first lady’s extremely conspicuous silence during a health crisis that affected tens of thousands of Americans.
I just don’t know what she was talking about. In fact that was a very tragic moment in modern American history, there were many many people who were dying of Aids, and in fact there was demand all over the country for President Reagan to start talking about this tragedy, and yet he refused to talk about it
I’m glad she apologized, but the truth it was not President Reagan and Nancy Reagan who were leaders … quite the contrary … they didn’t get involved in it.
Sanders: Trump lies about communism and protests
Bernie Sanders is next on the CNN program, and the host asks the Vermont senator about Trump’s accusations of sending “disrupters” to rallies.
Sanders says we should take “Mr Trump’s words with a grain of salt because, I think, as almost everybody knows, this man” can’t stop lying.
“To call me a communist is a lie. To talk about our organization or our campaign disrupting his event is a lie.”
He acknowledges that some of the protesters in Chicago were supporters of his, “but certainly, absolutely, our campaign had nothing to do with his meeting,”
“Even his Republican colleagues make this point,” Sanders goes on, “his language, his intonations, when you see people suckerpunch, people kick people when they’re down. This is a man who keeps impyling violence and you are getting what you see.”
“In the United States of America you don’t go beating up people, people have a right to peacefully protest,” he says.
Sanders takes the thought further, saying that “Trump is getting nervous” and “getting reckless” because he’s seeing the senator ahead of him in hypothetical general election polls.
“We cannot have a president like Trump who insults Mexicans, who insults Muslims, who insults women,” he says.
He reasserts that his campaign had nothing to do with the protests. “There were many many many organizations,” in Chicago, he says. “I do not like anybody disrupting anybody’s meetings,.”
He concludes that he’ll gladly tell his supporters, as often as he has to, that there’s no place for violence or attempts to suppress free speech.
Updated
Tapper asks about Trump’s tweet this morning that threatens to disrupt Sanders rallies.
Trump: “It’s not a threat, it’s not a threat. It’s not a threat at all! … My people have said we oughtta go to his rallies, when liberals, and super liberals, I don’t even call ‘em liberals.
“These people are bad people that are looking to do harm to our country. These people come into mine … They’re being arrested and all sorts of things are happening to them. … There’s a horrible thing going on in the media. We are treated so unfairly, and I’m treated so unfairly.”
Even Tapper stands up to him, saying people are getting hurt – Trump doesn’t let him finish.
“My fellow Republicans are running against me, they are losing big league.”
Tapper tries to bring it back to the human cost of Trump’s rhetoric, Trump repeats in an irritated voice “excuse me, excuse me!” He dismisses the idea that anyone was hurt or could be hurt because of his rallies.
“The danger was ended by a very good managerial decision not to have” a rally in Chicago, he says. “How many people have been injured at my rallies? Zero, zero!”
Tapper: “I don’t think it’s zero…”
Trump does not mention the protester suckerpunched last week, the reporter assaulted (allegedly by Trump campaign manager), or the protester bloodied outside a rally in St Louis.
He says that his rallies get “thousands and thousands of people” who don’t get hurt, suggesting that the few who do get hurt don’t matter. But he doesn’t acknowledge those people. The interview ends.
First up this Sunday morning is Donald Trump on CNN’s State of the Union.
Host Jake Tapper tells Trump he’s “being faulted for a tone, encouraging violence”, and asks the Republican frontrunner whether he ever thinks about triyng to calm people down.
“I think in many cases I do lower the temperature,” Trump says, “when I say things like I’d lie to punch him, frankly this is a person” who’s violent and “crazy”.
He says he doesn’t even call the protesters protesters, he says. “I call ‘em disrupters. A lot of them come from Bernie Sanders, whether he wants to say it or not, if he says no, he’s lying.”
“We have great rallies, we have by far the biggest rallies … and out of that we’ve had very little problem.”
“What I did with Chicago, it would’ve been easier to go … because you had professional disrupters, thousands of them, from Sanders, and to a smaller extent Hillary.”
“You had Sanders disrupters going over there … and I’ll tell you what, I think what I did, and I’ve gotten a lot of credit for [canceling]. … My supporters have tremendous love of this country, they’re tired of getting ripped off.”
He says “you would’ve had a tremendous clash,” had he not canceled the rally in Chicago.
Trump threatens to disrupt Sanders events
Hello and welcome to our live coverage of the 2016 presidential election – of late a contest seeing pepper spray and police intervention, racially charged arguments and violent clashes, all at the stoking of one man: Donald Trump.
Trump began the weekend in Chicago, which he quickly left in a state of disarray: he cancelled a rally at the sight of hundreds of protesters outside the venue and dozens inside it. Those protesters scuffled with his supporters, two police officers were injured and five people arrested, including a CBS News reporter who was charged with “resisting arrest”.
But the billionaire sallied onward, speaking at events in Ohio and Missouri with little regard for facts of the night before. Although Chicago police quickly asserted that “they did not consult us at all”, the billionaire put out a statement that the police were “informed of everything before it happened. Likewise secret service and private security firms were consulted and totally involved”.
He then blamed supporters of Bernie Sanders, organized groups, “many of them thugs”, and defended his sometimes violent fans.
“I don’t have regrets,” he said on Friday. “These were very, very bad protesters. These were bad dudes. They were rough, tough guys.”
He started up again on Sunday. No thuggishness to see here.
Bernie Sanders is lying when he says his disruptors aren't told to go to my events. Be careful Bernie, or my supporters will go to yours!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 13, 2016
The Democratic candidates denounced him: Sanders called him a “a pathological liar” who heads “a vicious movement” and Hillary Clinton said he was guilty of “political arson”.
His Republican rivals hedged on their pledges to support the party nominee, even Trump: Ted Cruz said his opponent’s campaign “affirmatively encourages violence”, Marco Rubio said “this is what happens” when a campaign feeds off resentment, and John Kasich said the frontrunner was preying on fears.
There are only two days left before Kasich and Rubio’s reckoning: they need to win their home states of Ohio and Florida on Tuesday to have any chance at all of staying in the race. Meanwhile, many Republicans are debating the devil they know – Ted Cruz, a man so personally disliked he has spawned a Zodiac killer meme – versus the devil they don’t – the bilious Trump.
For Democrats, Sanders’ win last week in Michigan rattled Clinton, although she retains a huge lead in delegates and superdelegates according to AP estimates.
All this and more is on the talk show tables this morning, where cable TV hosts will confront the candidates on policy, personality and the campaign chaos. They may even succeed in keeping it relatively civil, as these pro- and anti-Trump protesters did in St Louis.
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