Last week, Trump and his campaign manager Corey Lewandowski repeatedly denied that Lewandowski had grabbed Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields, even as more and more evidence accumulated that appeared to substantiate Fields’s allegations.

On Monday, Trump claimed there’s no violence at his events. “The press is now calling, they’re saying, ‘Oh but there’s such violence.’ There’s no violence,” Trump said, then added, paradoxically, “You know how many people have been hurt at our rallies? I think like, basically none, other than I guess maybe somebody got hit once or something. But there’s no violence.” He has also said he did nothing to encourage violence against protestors.

Those are both ridiculous ideas. Even leaving aside the Fields case, there’s the peaceful protester sucker-punched by an attendee in Fayetteville, North Carolina. There’s the Time photographer in an altercation with a Secret Service agent. There was the Black Lives Matter protestor attacked in November. There were the Hispanic protesters hit in October. And then there are Trump’s many statements encouraging violence against protesters, more and less obliquely, collected by Dara Lind. As protestors were escorted out in Fayetteville, for example, Trump said, “See, in the good old days this didn’t use to happen, because they used to treat them very rough. We’ve become very weak.” Meanwhile, there were near-fistfights outside. (A spokesman for the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Department said Monday that contrary to reports, they did not plan to charge Trump with inciting a riot. “If we were going to do it, I think we would have done it by now. We didn’t hesitate to charge Mr. [John] McGraw,” the man who sucker-punched a protestor, said Sergeant Sean Swain.)

The string of incidents, especially since the Chicago debacle, have sparked a fresh round of soul-searching and doom-saying from pundits. They are right to speak out, for any number of reasons. Outbreaks of violence like this at political rallies are unhealthy and dangerous.

But it also ought to go without saying that this elite disapprobation won’t do anything to dissuade most Trump supporters—who are often backing him because of their own revulsion at those same elites in the first place. Preliminary poll results suggest Trump backers aren’t holding any of this against Trump.

One possibility is to read the protests as a threat to the First Amendment: Hordes of protesters showing up in Chicago, and effectively preventing the exercise of speech. Under this theory, it's just another symptom of the political correctness Trump is fighting.

But it’s easier just to pretend that the protestors are violent aggressors and have been all along. Trump has argued, in the absence of evidence, that protesters have caused other violent incidents at past rallies. He’s claimed protesters are plants from the Bernie Sanders campaign, as though there’s no possibility of grassroots grievances against Trump. On Monday, one of Trump’s top surrogates also blamed saboteurs:

Sarah Palin tells Trump rally: There's no time for “petty punk-ass thuggery stuff” from protesters. — Steve Peoples (@sppeoples) March 14, 2016

There are indications that Trump understands the danger this violence now poses to his political hopes, even if he was content to stoke it in the past. The campaign has taken to making announcements asking people not to touch protestors. But at the same time, the candidate continues to point a finger elsewhere.