Protesters rally outside of the University of Illinois at Chicago where Donald Trump was scheduled to hold an event on March 11. The event was later canceled due to safety concerns. | AP Photo Trump: Sanders is responsible for violence

Donald Trump was adamant on Sunday morning he was not responsible for encouraging violence and chaos at his rallies, instead pointing the finger at Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.

"I don't even call them protesters, I call them disrupters," Trump said on CNN's "State of The Union." "A lot of them come from Bernie Sanders, whether he wants to say it or not. If he says no, then he's lying."


While chaos and protests have been common at Trump rallies for months, there's been a sharp escalation in recent days after protesters managed to shut down a Trump rally in Chicago on Friday. Trump pinned the cancellation on protesters he claimed were sent by the Sanders campaign.

"And then what I did with Chicago, it would've been easier for me to go and make the speech, and you would've had had a clash because you had thousands of professional disrupters from Sanders and to a lesser extent, Hillary," Trump said. "Hillary doesn't have much fervor."

There's no evidence the Sanders campaign is directly sending supporters to disrupt Trump events, although an independent group of Sanders supporters claimed some responsibility for stopping the Chicago event. Appearing on the same show, Sanders said he had nothing to do with the protests.

"Trump is not telling the truth. It should not surprise anybody. He very rarely tells the truth," Sanders said, later adding: "Our campaign had nothing to do with disrupting his meeting."

Sanders said Trump's violent rhetoric was to blame.

"His language, his intonations, when he talks about carrying people out in stretchers," he said. "When you see people at his rallies, people sucker-punch folks, kick people while they're down. This is man who keeps implying violence and then you end up getting what you see."

Later Sunday at a rally at Ohio State University in Columbus, Sanders doubled down on his criticism.

“You don’t go around saying that it’s OK to beat somebody up and I’ll pay the legal fees,” Sanders told the crowd at the Buckeyes' football stadium.