Trump accuses Sanders supporters of disrupting his rallies

Marcy Oster

Donald Trump speaking to supporters in Louisville, Kentucky, March 1, 2016. (Mark Cornelison/Lexington Herald-Leader/TNS via Getty Images)

Donald Trump speaking to supporters in Louisville, Kentucky, March 1, 2016. (Mark Cornelison/Lexington Herald-Leader/TNS via Getty Images)

(JTA) — Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders called GOP frontrunner Donald Trump a “pathological liar” after Trump accused Sanders supporters of disrupting his rallies.

Trump also called Sanders, a social democrat, “our communist friend.”

“All of a sudden a planned attack just came out of nowhere,” Trump said Saturday morning at a rally in Dayton, Ohio, describing the cancellation of a scheduled rally in Chicago on Friday, where skirmishes between Trump supporters and protesters led to its cancellation.

Trump said his supporters “were taunted, they were harassed by these other people, these other people by the way, some represented Bernie, our communist friend.”

“Now really Bernie should tell his people … he should really get up and say to his people ‘stop, stop,’” Trump said.

The Sanders campaign said in a statement released Saturday in response to Trump’s accusations: “As is the case virtually every day, Donald Trump is showing the American people that he is a pathological liar. Obviously, while I appreciate that we had supporters at Trump’s rally in Chicago, our campaign did not organize the protests.”

Trump ramped up the rhetoric against Sanders early Sunday morning in a tweet in which he threatened: “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!”

The clashes in Chicago come on the heels of violent incidents at other Trump rallies, against protesters and journalists. The behavior on Friday of the protesters, Trump supporters and Trump himself were all criticized by the other candidates, as well.

Five presidential primaries are scheduled for Tuesday, in Illinois, Ohio, Florida, North Carolina and Missouri.

Also on Saturday, a Trump supporter shouted “Go to Auschwitz” during a rally for Trump in Kansas City, Missouri.

Earlier this month, Trump came under fire for asking supporters at a rally in Florida to raise their right hand and pledge to vote for him, prompting critics to compare the pledge to the Nazi salute..

Meanwhile, a woman caught in a photo making a Nazi salute outside of the Chicago arena where the Trump rally was cancelled, told the New York Times that she used the gesture as a type of counter protest against those who compare Trump to the Nazi fuehrer.

Birgitt Peterson, 69, who was born in West Berlin in 1946 and became an American citizen in 1982, told the New York Times she took offense to the comparison of Trump to Hitler. She asserted that she is not a Nazi sympathizer, as some who have seen the photo have suggested.

“They said Trump is a second Hitler. I said do you know what that sign stands for? Do you know who Hitler really was?” Peterson said.  “I make the point that they are demonstrating something they had no knowledge about. If you want to do it right, you do it right. You don’t know what you are doing.”

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