Donald Trump advisors are coming up with all sorts of crazy and ridiculous defenses to try and create false equivalences between Donald and other candidates and politicians to make believe he's doing nothing out of the ordinary when he tells his supporters that he'd love to punch protesters in the face.
Huckabee's daughter follows daddy's form by denying Trump has ever said anything that can be construed as inciting violence to his followers on CNN, and in fact, then blames Obama for doing the same thing.
TRUMP: They're troublemakers. They're no good, and we'd better be careful. We've got to take our country back, folks. We've got to take our country back. Very simple.(END VIDEO CLIP) BASH: That was Donald Trump responding to protesters last night in Arizona. Will these have any effect on his campaign?
What do you think? Do you believe that he's doing enough to stop these protests?
SARAH HUCKABEE SANDERS, SENIOR ADVISOR, DONALD TRUMP: You know, I don't think that there's anything in Donald Trump's rhetoric that is inviting or inciting violence. I want to know sometimes where the outcry is when Barack Obama was saying let's put -- you know, the GOP is putting a gun to the Americans' heads and things like that. There was no outcry over that language.
Donald Trump isn't saying, let's start a riot or let's create violence. You have people that are coming in, creating a scene, into a very passionate, fired-up crowd and expecting no consequences. I made kind of the comparison earlier as a southerner with a couple of fellow southerners here, if I went into an LSU game saying, LSU Tigers are losers, and expected no one to say anything to me and for there not to be any consequences, I think that would be a big mistake. And I think that we're, you know, putting all the blame on Donald Trump and not putting any of it on the protesters themselves. And I think that's a big, big problem.
Can we count the ways of how disingenuous she is being here? Not only is she linking Donald's violence to an off hand remark by Obama but now she's using college football rivalry games to deflect criticism from Trump.
If Les Myles, the head coach of LSU told their fans that he wished it was the old days and protesters were beaten to a pulp, do you think he would be suspended and then fired?
Or if Myles pledged to pay anyone's legal bills if they get carried away?
"Try not to hurt him. If you do, I'll defend you in court, don't worry about it."
Or, if after a game, Myles went on to say, "I'd like to punch him in the face" and "knock the crap out of them." Do you think he'd still be on the team? He'd be long gone.
BAKARI SELLERS, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: I think the comparison -- and I've heard those talking points from many Trump surrogates to what Barack Obama said is just intellectually disingenuous because of the simple fact that was just an analogy. And none of his supporters took that seriously. But when Donald Trump is out there saying I'm going to punch him in the face, when Donald Trump is calling Mexicans rapists, when he's insulting every single ethnic group and every person, the only group that Donald Trump hasn't insulted right now has been white men, for all practical purposes. And he's gone down the list and insulted everybody.
You cannot say that his rhetoric is not partially to blame for this. And I hope that Donald Trump, because he's not at a college football game, he's not with a bunch of co-eds. He's running for the president of the free world. And my hope is that he elevates his rhetoric and the discourse.
