During a Sunday morning interview, real-estate mogul Donald Trump expressed some support for his fans who reportedly punched and kicked a heckler the day before at a presidential-campaign rally.
After his "Fox & Friends" interviewer referred to the incident as the man being "roughed up," Trump said, "I don't know. Roughed up? Maybe he should have been roughed up because it was absolutely disgusting what he was doing."
The Republican front-runner repeatedly called his heckler "obnoxious."
"The man that was -- I don't know, you say 'roughed up' -- he was so obnoxious and so loud. He was screaming. I had 10,000 people in the room yesterday -- 10,000 people. And this guy started screaming by himself," Trump recalled.
"I have lot of fans and they were not happy about it. And this was a very obnoxious guy, who was a troublemaker who was looking to make trouble," he continued.
CNN reported that at a Saturday Trump rally in Birmingham, Alabama, a man wearing a Black Lives Matter T-shirt was "punched and kicked" by attendees as he was ejected for heckling the candidate.
"At least a half-dozen attendees shoved and tackled the protester, a black man, to the ground as he refused to leave the event. At least one man punched the protester and a woman kicked him while he was on the ground," the network reported.
A Trump spokeswoman told CNN that "the campaign does not condone this behavior."