A defiant Donald Trump on Sunday denied responsibility for the chaos at his aborted Chicago rally while his opponents conceded protesters’ central role, backtracking from initial reactions that accused Trump of helping incite the disruptions.

“You haven’t seen one person even injured at one of our rallies,” Trump told John Dickerson on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “And the cases you are talking about, the one guy was a bad dude. He was swinging, he was hitting people, he was a very bad guy,” he said.

“These people are disrupters, they’re not protesters,” Trump said. “I don’t condone violence. But some of these people are violent.”

Speaking with Jake Tapper on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Trump went further. “These people are bad people who are looking to do harm to this country,” Trump said of the activist protesters who sabotaged his Chicago rally.

Trump also reminded Tapper that he has “gotten a lot of credit” for cancelling the rally in order to prevent further violence or injury. He not only denied inciting violence at his rallies but reminded the host that “in many cases, I do lower the temperature.”

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Trump was adamant that his sometimes aggressive rhetoric was not meant to incite violence. “I don’t accept responsibility [and] I do not condone violence in any form,” he told Todd. Trump also implied Sunday that some of the protestors were sent by the Sanders campaign, something that Sen. Bernie Sanders denied vigorously Sunday.

“To talk about our organization or our campaign disrupting his meeting is a lie,” Sanders told Tapper. Sanders, however, admitted that some of his supporters were indeed protesting. “Some of them were supporters of mine, but, certainly, absolutely, we had nothing to do — our campaign had nothing to do with disrupting his meeting,” he said.

“We have millions of supporters out there,” he told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. “Clearly, some of them were at that rally … but to say that we organized that — totally untrue.”

To his credit, Sanders denounced the protesters’ actions and encouraged his supporters to respect free speech. “I think people have the right to protest. I do not like people disrupting anybody’s meetings. And I would hope that my supporters will not disrupt meetings. To protest is one thing. To disrupt is something else,” he said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

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Despite expressing concern on CNN’s “State of the Union” that Trump’s rhetoric makes it “harder everyday to justify” voting for Trump if he is the nominee, Rubio told Stephanopoulos that “ultimately the responsibility bears on” the protestors in Chicago.

“A lot of them, I believe, were paid and organized; that wasn’t some organic thing. I think you saw MoveOn.org, I think you saw all these different elements involved,” he said. “They don’t have the right to disrupt an event and threaten violence so it doesn’t occur.”

When asked by Tapper if such violence could result in a death, Rubio answered he was “very concerned about that … we don’t know what’s going to happen next.”

“I don’t doubt that people were looking to disrupt” Trump’s event, Gov. John Kasich told Tapper. And despite claiming that Trump’s language has put “one group against another” he said he is “not going to tell you that in his rallies some of these people don’t show up who want to create problems.”

“The protesters were in the wrong,” Sen. Ted Cruz told Stephanopoulos. “When you come up and you use violence, you engage in violence, you threaten violence, and when you try to shut down and shout down speech, that’s not what the First Amendment allows,” Cruz said.

People have a right to assemble and protest peacefully, but the radicals who went to Trump’s Chicago rally with the purpose of preventing it from proceeding were objecting to nothing but the fact that somebody somewhere has the audacity to hold — and voice — opinions with which they disagree.

“These protestors, whether they’re Black Lives Matter or Bernie Sanders supporters” don’t have a right to shut down free speech, Cruz told NBC’s Chuck Todd on “Meet the Press.”