DAYTON, Ohio (Reuters) – Secret Service officers rushed on stage to protect U.S. Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump during a disturbance at a rally on Saturday, a day after rowdy protests shut down his event in Chicago.

Trump briefly ducked at the podium and four Secret Service members scrambled to surround him after a man charged the stage at Dayton International Airport in Ohio.

Officers then grabbed the man, dressed in a black T-shirt and jeans, before he was able to reach the stage and hauled him away.

“I was ready. I don’t know if I would have done well but I would have been out there fighting, folks,” Trump told a rally later in the day. He said the man “was looking to do harm.”

The incident further increased tension after Trump’s Chicago rally was scrapped amid chaotic scenes on Friday.

Trump’s Republican rivals hurled scorn at the New York billionaire, saying he helped create the nervous atmosphere that is now sweeping the race for the White House with his fiery rhetoric.

Trump blamed supporters of Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders for the incidents in Chicago, where scuffles broke out between protesters and backers of the real estate magnate. He called the U.S. senator from Vermont “our communist friend.”

The scenes in Chicago followed a series of recent incidents of violence at Trump rallies, in which protesters and journalists have been punched, tackled and hustled out of venues, raising concerns about degrading security leading into the Nov. 8 election.

“All of a sudden a planned attack just came out of nowhere,” Trump said in Dayton, describing the events in Chicago. He called the protest leaders there “professional people”.

Sanders, a U.S. Senator from Vermont, hit back.

“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.”

President Barack Obama told a fundraising event in Dallas  that political leaders “should be trying to bring us together and not turning us against one another.”

Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton drew criticism for releasing an initial statement that did not mention Trump by name and tied violent campaign events to a shooting in a South Carolina black church last year that left 9 people dead.

While campaigning in St. Louis, Missouri, on Saturday, Clinton criticized Trump directly for “ugly, divisive rhetoric” that encourages aggression and violence.

CRUCIAL PRIMARIES

The months-long Republican race may be coming to a head at nominating contests on Tuesday where Trump is seeking victories that might give him an almost insurmountable lead for the nomination.

Primaries in Florida and Ohio will be particularly important since they are winner-take-all states, where all Republican delegates are given to the winner of the popular vote instead of being awarded proportionally.

It will be a make-or-break day for Republican candidates John Kasich, the governor of Ohio, and U.S. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, who both must win their home states to forge a credible path forward.

Trump has drawn fervent support as well as criticism for his calls to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and to impose a temporary ban on Muslims entering the country.

His rallies often attract small groups of protesters, but Friday’s was the first at which there may have been as many protesters as supporters.

At an event in Kansas City on Saturday, Trump urged police to arrest people who disrupt his events.

“They’ll have to explain to Mom and Dad why they have a police record and why they can’t get a job. And you know what? I’m going to start pressing charges against all these people and then we won’t have a problem,” he said to cheers.

Outside the rally, police broke up confrontations between Trump supporters and protesters who shouted, “Shut it down!”

Police on horseback and riot gear briefly moved into a crowd of protesters and officers used what appeared to be pepper spray against demonstrators for a few seconds.

Rubio, who according to the New York Times slightly edged out Kasich on Saturday to win the Washington D.C. primary with 37 percent of the vote, bemoaned the state of the presidential race during an event in Florida, saying it had “become reality television.”

“Last night in Chicago, we saw images that make America look like a Third World country,” Rubio said, reminding supporters the stakes on Tuesday are high.

Kasich told journalists before a campaign event in Cincinnati, Ohio, that Trump had created a “toxic environment.”

Republican candidate U.S. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas called the Chicago incidents “sad.”

Vanderbilt University political scientist John Geer said that the tension on display at Trump’s events are a proxy for what is going on in the electorate writ large.

“People have strong reactions to Donald Trump,” Geer said. “They are playing out in the voting booth and they are also playing out at these events.”

Geer said the Chicago cancellation would likely embolden Trump’s supporters – an idea floated by Trump in several television interviews.

Clinton picked up four delegates in the Northern Mariana Islands’ Democratic primary on Saturday, to Sanders’ two.

On the Republican side, Cruz won around two-thirds of the votes in Wyoming’s Republican nominating contest but because of the state’s unusual rules it is not clear how many Wyoming delegates will go his way at the Republican Convention in July.

(Additional reporting by Alex Dobuzinskis in Los Angeles, Kevin Murphy in Kansas City, Idrees Ali and Amanda Becker in Washington.; Editing by Alistair Bell and Sandra Maler)

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COLUMBIA, S.C. (Reuters) – Fresh off a runaway win in the South Carolina primary, Democrat Hillary Clinton turned her sights to a possible match-up with Republican front-runner Donald Trump in the Nov. 8 presidential election.

Without mentioning Trump’s name, the former secretary of state made it clear on Saturday she was already thinking about taking on the real estate mogul whose recent string of victories made him the favourite to be the Republican nominee for the White House race.

Clinton shot down Trump’s campaign slogan of “Make America Great Again” and his plans to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border.

“Despite what you hear, we don’t need to make America great again. America has never stopped being great,” she told supporters in her victory speech in South Carolina, pausing for applause then adding, “but we do need to make America whole again.”

“Instead of building walls, we need to be tearing down barriers,” said Clinton, who would be America’s first woman president.

Clinton said she was not taking anything for granted after crushing Democratic rival Bernie Sanders on Saturday by 48 points and likely setting herself up for a good “Super Tuesday” night on March 1, a key date in the nomination battle.

But if Clinton and Trump win big on Tuesday as polls suggest, the chance of a general election match up between them increases, adding another twist to a presidential campaign that has defied convention as U.S. voters vent frustration over economic uncertainty, illegal immigration and national security threats.

A Trump-Clinton election would embody the outsider vs. establishment battle in American politics. Trump has never been elected to public office, while the former first lady has been a player in Washington for decades.

South Carolina Democratic voter Teri Faust, 59, said Clinton would be better able to take on Trump than Sanders, a U.S. senator from Vermont.

“Bernie wouldn’t stand a chance against him. Hillary is strong,” said Faust, who met Clinton when she came to her church two years ago and again on Clinton’s first campaign trip to the state when she held a roundtable for minority women business owners.

SANDERS DOUBTS

South Carolina was Clinton’s third victory in the first four Democratic contests, raising more questions about whether democratic socialist Sanders will be able to expand his support beyond his base of predominantly white liberals.

Exit polls showed Clinton winning big in the state with almost every constituency. She won 9 of every 10 black voters, as well as women, men, urban, suburban, rural, very liberal and conservative voters. Sanders was ahead among voters between ages 18 and 29, and among white men.

When asked which candidate they thought “can win in November,” an overwhelming 79 percent said Clinton, with only 21 percent putting their faith in Sanders to defeat the eventual Republican nominee.

Sanders, who has energized the party’s liberal wing and brought young people to the polls by attacking income inequality and Wall Street excess, needs a breakthrough win in a key state in the next few weeks to keep his hopes alive.

“He’s got to pull off a surprise against Clinton soon or he won’t have time to recover,” said Phil Noble, a longtime Democratic activist in South Carolina.

He said Sanders’ momentum in South Carolina “fell off the table” after Clinton’s solid victory in Nevada on Feb. 20.

In the Republican race, Trump and rival Marco Rubio accelerated their political slugfest on Saturday during duelling appearances in Arkansas and Georgia.

“The majority of Republican voters do not want Donald Trump to be our nominee, and … they are going to support whoever is left standing that is fighting against him to ensure that we do not nominate a con artist,” Rubio told reporters in Georgia.

Trump, speaking in front of his private plane in Arkansas, belittled Rubio and accused the first-term U.S. senator from Florida of being fresh.

“I watched this lightweight Rubio, total lightweight, little mouth on him, ‘bing, bing, bing’ … and his new attack is he calls me a con artist,” Trump said. “The last thing I am is a con man.”

(Editing by Alistair Bell and Mary Milliken)

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