1 of 40 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad × What primary day looked like in Fla., Ill., Mo., N.C. and Ohio View Photos Voters in five states cast their ballets during primaries today. Caption Voters in five states cast their ballets during primaries today. March 15, 2016 Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a campaign news conference at the Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Fla. Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue. 
 
 Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump said Wednesday that a contested GOP convention could be a disaster if he goes to Cleveland a few delegates shy of 1,237 — and doesn't leave as the party's nominee. 
 
 "I think you'd have riots," Trump said on CNN. 
 
 Noting that he's "representing many millions of people," Trump told host Chris Cuomo: "If you disenfranchise those people, and you say, 'I'm sorry, you're 100 votes short' ... I think you'd have problems like you've never seen before. I think bad things would happen." 
 
 GOP leaders are scrambling to minimize Donald Trump's dominance in the polls, leaving many wondering what would happen if no one candidate wins a clear majority before the national convention. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post) 
 
 The billionaire businessman emphasized, though, that he expects to secure the 1,237 delegates needed to win the party's nomination ahead of the Republican National Convention in July. 
 
 "I'm a closer," he said. "I get things closed." 
 
 [The Stop Trump movement’s last realistic hope is now a contested convention in Cleveland] 
 
 Trump woke up Wednesday with 621 delegates. 
 
 He walloped Sen. Marco Rubio in the first-term senator’s home state of Florida on Tuesday, forcing Rubio from the race. He also won in Illinois and North Carolina, extending his lead over Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas as the once-unwieldy nominating contest narrowed to a three-person brawl with Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who won his home state's primary. 
 
 "I did well in Ohio, but I was running against a popular governor," Trump said Wednesday. He added: "I ran out of a little bit of time. I think if I had a day or two more, it would have been perhaps a little bit different." 
 
 [Donald Trump wins big] 
 
 Trump and Cruz are in a dead heat in Missouri, which was still too close to call on the morning after the Republican primary. The state has 52 Republican delegates. 
 
 "We started out with 17 people; we're down to three," Trump said on CNN. "But this has been a nasty one; I guess that's why your ratings are as high as they've ever been." 
 
 Republican front-runner Donald Trump spoke in Palm Beach, Fla., after primary voters took to the polls in five states: Florida, Illinois, Ohio, Missouri and North Carolina. (Reuters) 
 
 In a remarkable campaign fueled by anger, Trump has been under steady attack — by rival Republicans, by the Democratic candidates, by progressives, by super PACs determined to derail his candidacy, and by the president, who has twice taken shots at the GOP front-runner in recent days. 
 
 [President Obama's brutal assessment of the rise of Donald Trump] 
 
 The tone and tenor of of the campaign will eventually shift away from divisiveness and Trump will make peace with the Republican Party, he suggested Wednesday. 
 
 "I think there's a natural healing process, once the battle is over, once the war is over," Trump said. "I've gotten along with people all my life; this is actually a little unusual.... I think it will happen again." 
 
 He added: "We have to win, and as we win, people will forget and they will feel better. That's the way life is. After we put it away, a lot of feelings will be soothed." 
 
 But, Trump said in a subsequent interview on MSNBC: "We don't want to lose the edge. We still have two people left." 
 
 [Donald Trump holds a press conference — and doesn’t take any questions] 
 
 Asked Wednesday whether he'd consider Rubio for vice president, Trump deflected the question, telling MSNBC: "It's just too early." 
 
 Trump noted that he liked Rubio — "until about three weeks ago, when he started getting nasty.... I was very surprised when he started doing his Don Rickles routine on me." 
 
 But, he said later on Fox News: "My whole life people have plotted against me, and I'm doing very well." 
 
 Speaking by telephone on "Fox & Friends," Trump said he plans to skip the channel's March 21 debate in Salt Lake City to deliver a previously scheduled speech at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference in Washington. 
 
 Trump told Fox that he'll be delivering "a major speech in front of a very important group of people that night; it was scheduled a while ago." He said he can't and won't reconsider that commitment. 
 
 The Fox News debate was announced this week, and Trump said Wednesday that it came as a surprise. 
 
 "I thought the last debate on CNN was the last debate," he said. "I think we've had enough debates. How many times can the same people ask you the same question?" 
 
 He added: "I don't mind the process of debating; it turned out that I do it well.... But I think we've had enough." 
 
 This post has been updated. 
 
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 Liberal leaders: Trump’s candidacy is ‘a five-alarm fire for our democracy’ ||||| Donald Trump yanked the Republican Party toward a contested convention over the past 24 hours as he let rip an extraordinary series of statements on abortion, the Geneva Conventions, violence against women and his own commitment to supporting the GOP presidential nominee that seemed to obliterate the notion that the party will unite behind him anytime soon. 
 
 The fallout for Trump has been swift, as Republican rivals denounced the real estate mogul’s escalating attacks on a reporter who accused Trump’s campaign manager of battery and his suggestion that women should be punished for seeking abortions if the procedure is outlawed — a statement Trump quickly tried to walk back. 
 
 Story Continued Below 
 
 He also freshly rankled leading Republicans around the country for tearing up his previous pledge to support the eventual nominee, saying Tuesday night that “we’ll see who it is.” 
 
 The series of events gave mainstream Republicans new hope that they could prevent him from winning the nomination outright through pledged delegates. But they're also more worried than ever about a fractured party heading into the fall. 
 
 “Trump is an embarrassment for the party. He’s not a conservative, he’s not a Republican, he’s someone who’s simply for himself,” said Ryan Williams, a GOP consultant and veteran of Mitt Romney’s campaigns. “He’s set a new standard and is going to give a number of Republicans pause about supporting him if he’s the nominee. That’s Donald Trump’s fault and Donald Trump’s fault alone.” 
 
 Trump created yet another firestorm on Wednesday afternoon, when he lamented the existence of the Geneva Conventions. “The problem is we have the Geneva Conventions, all sorts of rules and regulations, so the soldiers are afraid to fight,” Trump said at an afternoon town hall. 
 
 But it was his comments regarding women — both his suggestion about criminalizing abortion and his escalating attacks on Breitbart journalist Michelle Fields — that set off the loudest alarm bells. 
 
 In a sign of how damaging his comments on abortion were, Trump swiftly reversed himself. The controversy started when MSNBC’s Chris Matthews pressed Trump on his statement that abortion “is a very serious problem, and it’s a problem we have to decide on. Are you going to send them to jail?” 
 
 After Matthews tried to draw him out on what should happen if abortions are outlawed, Trump responded, “There has to be some form of punishment.” 
 
 Bipartisan criticism was immediate, with Hillary Clinton calling the comment “horrific and telling” and Republican rival John Kasich strongly disputing Trump's assertion: “Absolutely not.” 
 
 The Trump campaign went into damage control mode, emailing out a clarifying statement. “If Congress were to pass legislation making abortion illegal and the federal courts upheld this legislation, or any state were permitted to ban abortion under state and federal law, the doctor or any other person performing this illegal act upon a woman would be held legally responsible, not the woman,” Trump said in the statement. “The woman is a victim in this case as is the life in her womb. My position has not changed — like Ronald Reagan, I am pro-life with exceptions.” 
 
 The statement on abortion compounded his inflammatory comments about Fields, the former reporter who accused Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, of roughly yanking her arm as she tried to ask Trump a question earlier this month. Lewandowski was charged with misdemeanor battery on Tuesday. 
 
 On Wednesday, Trump stoked the controversy by accusing Fields of provoking Lewandowski in the incident and brandishing a pen as she tried to talk to him. 
 
 “Fox & Friends” co-host Brian Kilmeade challenged Trump on his account of the incident Wednesday morning, saying that campaign managers like Lewandowski "should not be putting their hands on reporters." He added, "Karl Rove didn’t do it. David Plouffe didn’t do it, David Axelrod didn’t do it. That’s why you have Secret Service, and that’s why you have your own security.” 
 
 Trump shot back, speculating that perhaps the three campaign managers had. “OK, and you don’t know that they didn’t do it, because I guarantee you they did, probably did stuff that was more physical than this," he said. "More physical, because this is not even physical. And frankly, she shouldn’t have her hands on me. Nobody says that. But she shouldn’t have her hands on me.” 
 
 While Trump has become a master at firing off controversial comments and earning kudos from his core supporters for his disregard for political correctness, the real estate mogul is making little headway in his recently stated goal of convincing the Republican Party to unify behind him as the front-runner. 
 
 Trump has a large lead over rival Ted Cruz in the delegate race, 736 to the Texas senator’s 463, but it’s not clear whether he’ll be able to secure the 1,237 delegates needed to clinch the nomination before the July convention. 
 
 Poll numbers out Wednesday for Wisconsin’s primary next week were not encouraging for the real estate mogul. The survey from Marquette Law School, the state’s most reliable pollster, showed Cruz with a 10-point lead over Trump. 
 
 And the front-runner is winning few converts among centrist Republicans. At one point earlier this year, some on Capitol Hill and among the lobbyist crowd on K Street entertained the idea that Trump would be preferable to Cruz. 
 
 They had considered Trump someone with whom they could cut deals, and questioned whether he really believed the fiery rhetoric he employed on the stump. But his repudiation on Tuesday night of his promise to support the eventual GOP nominee — on top of a string of other controversial statements he's made over the past few weeks — made many Republicans deeply uncomfortable, making unity an even more unlikely prospect. 
 
 “As head of the party, it is disturbing for anybody — not necessarily Trump — saying that they may or may not support our nominee,” said Diana Waterman, chairwoman of the Maryland GOP. “At the end of it, we’re supposed to all come together. That includes the people who were not successful in getting there.” 
 
 Another party chairman from a state with an upcoming primary, who requested anonymity to share reservations about Trump, said his theatrics take the party’s focus off members' shared rejection of Clinton and Bernie Sanders. 
 
 “Unfortunately it seems that whenever Mr. Trump is worried he may not become the Republican nominee, he makes these sorts of comments,” the chairman said. “My concern about his latest comments is that it will only make it harder for him to convince longtime loyal grass-roots Republicans of his sincerity and to persuade them to rally behind his candidacy. All of the Republican candidates must always first consider the best interest of this country and not hurt feelings.” 
 
 But there is also risk to Republican leaders in being openly hostile to Trump. In a contested convention scenario, there is no guarantee that Trump supporters would get in line behind another candidate should the real estate mogul fall short, particularly if they feel that he has been treated unfairly by the party — and Trump has already claimed mistreatment. 
 
 “How things are conducted going forward matters, and I’m really personally counting on our party leadership to set an example and come together,” said Steve Munisteri, former chairman of the Republican Party of Texas. 
 
 Munisteri said that if Trump ultimately wins the nomination, he would expect supporters of Cruz and Kasich to put aside their differences and back him, regardless of what the candidates themselves do. But, he acknowledged, Trump backers are less predictable and could set the stage for a deeply damaging moment for the Republican Party. 
 
 There is also always the threat of a third-party bid, either from Trump himself if he doesn’t clinch the GOP nomination, or from another candidate brought in as an alternative to Trump, though Republicans well-versed in party rules note that there is limited time, and ballot access constraints could keep that headache in check. 
 
 But as the convention nears with Trump still leading the pack, despite his fiery statements, the Republican Party’s soul-searching will become even more dire. 
 
 “I don’t envy my friends at the [Republican National Committee] right now,” said Williams, the Romney veteran. “It’s going to be a difficult task for the RNC to try to bring the party together.” 
 
 Nolan D. McCaskill, Ben Schreckinger and Eliza Collins contributed to this report.
– Donald Trump's campaign rallies have made headlines because of violence, but he suggests we haven't seen anything yet if the GOP somehow deprives him of the nomination at the convention. "I think you'd have riots," he said on CNN Wednesday, per USA Today and the Washington Post. "I'm representing many, many millions of people." Trump predicted he'd lock up the necessary number of delegates to secure the nomination anyway—"I'm a closer"—but he warned that the party will be flirting with trouble if it moves toward a brokered convention in the event he comes up shy. "If you disenfranchise those people, and you say, 'I'm sorry, you're 100 votes short' ... I think you'd have problems like you've never seen before. I think bad things would happen."