As you can see in the feature story, something happened today at a Trump rally in Ohio. What is clear from the video is that while Trump was speaking at an open air rally in Dayton, Ohio, half a dozen of what appear to be Secret Service agents rushed to him to protect his body. I had heard from people who said Trump had been rushed on the stage. But the video shows clearly that that did not happen. Presumably, the agents saw something they believed to be an imminent threat to Trump and rushed to protect him. We will try to find out more about what happened.
Updating my post from yesterday, we continue to have technical issues with our comment system. Our tech team is working on a fix. And we hope to have the issue resolved shortly.
We are fully aware of the 39th amendment’s protections of the right to comment and are working to fix the problem as rapidly as we can.
Interesting segment on CNN just now. Jeff Zeleny is explaining that at least outside the Chicago event the crowds were very diverse – ethnically, in terms of age, individuals and families – and orderly, not violent or threatening. A real cross section. Obviously inside the event things got unruly. But that seems to be a very incomplete picture of what happened.
Arm-Grab-Gate has now descended into a bizarre replay of the Kennedy Assassination Zapruder Film. But it seems everybody who touches this story gets splattered with derp. Here’s MSNBC having a bit of a hard time. Watch.
Here’s the latest on the weird goings-on within the Virgin Island’s GOP, which we first told you about late yesterday.
Trump today on rally violence: “You know what? The audience swung back. And I thought it was very, very appropriate. He was swinging. He was hitting people. And the audience hit back. And that’s what we need a little bit more of.”
Full story here.
As you may have seen we’re currently having some technical issues with our article comments system. The Hive is still up and running; because it works slightly differently. Our techs are working on it now and we’ll update you as soon as they’re back online.
The big takeaway from tonight’s debate – perhaps ‘confirmation’ is a better word for it – is that Donald Trump can turn the bully boy shtick on and off like a spigot. Watching this debate was like being transported back to the pre-2016 GOP debate world where one candidate ranting “Little Marco” ten times or another putting up his hands to show how big they were was essentially unimaginable. The tone of this gathering made it seem almost unthinkable again.
As everyone has noted, Trump is now trying not only to pivot to the general election but reassure GOP party stakeholders with his restraint and smother his competitors with talk of unity. I thought Trump and Cruz did very well for themselves but in very different ways. Trump owned his frontrunner-dom, didn’t deign to rise to the taunts of his competitors and didn’t let the moderators – especially Dana Bash – orchestrate a confrontation. He didn’t allow himself to get knocked off that game. A bit more tired by the end of the debate, he was a little less able to keep attack Donald under wraps. But overall, he kept it cool and restrained. He kept to his plan.
10:59 PM: This was one of my favorite moments of the debate: When Donald Trump rebranded “majority” as an artificial, arbitrary number.
If two of us get up there, I would say this — if Marco, if the governor, if Ted had more votes than me in the form of delegates, I think whoever gets to that top position as opposed to solving that artificial number that was set by somebody, which is a very random number, I think that whoever gets the most delegates should win. That’s what I think. “
10:34 PM: Trump knows he can turn this audience to his side on protestor beatings.
“We have some protesters who are bad dudes, they have done bad things. They are swinging, they are really dangerous and they get in there and start hitting people. We had a couple big, strong, powerful guys doing serious damage.”
10:37 PM: Ted Cruz is an consummate bullshit artist. But on the hand raising stuff, that was some quality bullshit.
10:40 PM: I was beginning to worry that the crowd beatings story wasn’t going to get mentioned at all. But Tapper did it in a pretty comprehensive way.
10:44 PM: Getting a bit tired, rowdy boy Trump seems to be reemerging.