Do Trump's rivals benefit by blaming him for Chicago chaos?

LAKELAND, Florida - Marco Rubio lays much of the blame for the mass protest that shut down Donald Trump's Chicago rally on Trump himself. But some of Rubio's supporters see things differently. They see the protesters as bearing most or all of the guilt for the chaos in Chicago. And they point to the work of leftist organizing groups as the key factor in the affair.

"It was too organized," said Cynthia Dugan, who came to Concord Coffee here in Lakeland to catch Rubio's quick stop Saturday afternoon, just four days before the Florida primary. "I think it was organized by MoveOn.org and Black Lives Matter; it wasn't just a spontaneous event."

I asked Dugan who was to blame. "The protesters," she answered. "And, unfortunately, some of the press."

"To me, it's just too well organized - MoveOn.org and George Soros are spending a tremendous amount of money to disrupt," said Richard Dempsey, of Lakeland. I asked Dempsey whether he blamed Trump for the chaos in Chicago. "No, I don't," Dempsey said. "I think it's an effort to discredit Trump. Everybody from every direction is trying to discredit him and defeat his campaign. I'm not a big supporter, but I will vote for him if he is the eventual nominee."

I asked Dick Goddard, of Lakeland, who was to blame. "It's the protesters," Goddard answered quickly. "They've got no business doing that."

Dugan and Dempsey said they will enthusiastically vote for Rubio on Tuesday; Goddard said he is still trying to choose between Rubio and Ted Cruz.

Earlier Saturday, in an appearance in Largo, Rubio conceded that the protesters were "not blameless" in the Trump Chicago affair. But Rubio saved his most critical words for Trump himself.

"I think we also have to look at the rhetoric coming from the front-runner in the presidential campaign," Rubio told reporters. "This is a man who in rallies has told his supporters to basically beat up the people who are in the crowd and he will pay their legal fees. Someone who has basically encouraged people in the audience to rough up anyone who stands up and says something he doesn't like."

"There are people in this country that are angry because they feel disenfranchised from the American dream," Rubio continued. "But the job of a leader is not to stoke that anger. The job of a leader is to address the causes of that anger and try to solve it, not try to stoke that anger so that they vote for you."

In rallies the day after the Chicago chaos, Trump emphasized the organized nature of the disruption. "We're all together and we want to get along with everybody, but when they have organized, professionally staged wiseguys, we've got to fight back, we've got to fight back," Trump said in Dayton.

Trump was right about the organization. In a report headlined "How Bernie Sanders supporters shut down a Donald Trump rally in Chicago," NBC's Alex Seitz-Wald detailed how veterans of the Occupy movement, of Black Lives Matter, of MoveOn.org, and other organizations, many of them now supporting Bernie Sanders, worked together to overpower Trump. And Seitz-Wald reported that Trump may have picked the worst possible location by coming to Chicago.

"The pump was primed in Chicago," Seitz-Wald wrote, "thanks to now near-constant demonstrations against Mayor Rahm Emanuel over the shooting of Laquan McDonald and other issues. Trump chose a venue, the University of Illinois Chicago campus, in the heart of the city, where student organizers whipped a demonstration together. And activists tapped into existing networks of pro-Bernie Sanders and Black Lives Matter activists."

"We wanted to show Trump that this is Chicago, and we run Chicago, and we're not going to take this," Seitz-Wald quoted local activist Ja'Mal Green as saying. "We got better organizers here."

"Remember the #TrumpRally wasn't just luck," tweeted the pro-Sanders group People for Bernie. "It took organizers from dozens of organizations and thousands of people to pull off. Great work."

The Los Angeles Times published a similar report, "How black, Latino and Muslim college students organized to stop Trump's rally in Chicago." Even Bill Ayers, the 1960s Weather Underground bomber who became a bête noire of conservatives in the Obama years, was in the picture. "We shut Trump down!" Ayers tweeted after the canceled rally. "Beautiful gathering of anti-racist youth."

Still, Rubio directed most of his blame at Trump. Fellow Trump rivals Ted Cruz and John Kasich also placed blame on the front-runner. Now, the question is whether their supporters agree.

Yes, some Rubio voters blamed Trump. "He brought it on himself," said Chickie Migliaccio, of Kissimmee, who came to see Rubio in Lakeland. "He incites people, he's provocative," added Chickie's husband Pat. "Hey, I'm from New Jersey. We don't talk that way in New Jersey."

But many of Rubio's supporters, and Republican voters in general, are big consumers of conservative media, and for years they have seen reports about MoveOn.org, about Occupy, about Black Lives Matter, about Soros, about Ayers - a veritable roster of villainy on the left. Now they are seeing (accurate) reports that some of those groups were behind the Trump protests in Chicago. And they are supposed to blame Trump? Not likely.

But that doesn't mean they support Trump. Indeed, the reactions at the small Rubio event in Lakeland served to show that voters can support a non-Trump candidate and at the same time believe Trump was unjustly targeted by left-wing activists. Take Cynthia Dugan, who has liked Rubio for years. "I support him because he's a gentleman and he's got good ethics," Dugan told me. "He's a family man, and he absolutely knows the issues."

The bottom line is, the more Republicans learn about the events in Chicago, the more they are likely to blame the left-wing activists behind the chaos. It seems unlikely that Rubio, or Cruz, or Kasich, will gain much by blaming Trump. For many Republican voters, blaming the actual culprits in the Trump Chicago affair is a matter of seeing the far left, not Trump, as the real adversary - and that does not necessarily equal supporting Trump.

© 2016, Universal