Republican candidate Ted Cruz’s issues with his citizenship have been keeping a lot of headlines lately, so his rivals did nothing but exploit this in their advantage.
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In a six-day bus trek across Iowa that ended Saturday, the senator glad-handed voters at Kings Christian Bookstore in Boone, Penny’s Diner in Missouri Valley, Godfather’s Pizza in Spirit Lake and Praise Community Church in Mason City.
“And I say this as a friend of the party, and as a friend of Ted – he’s got to go in and get a declaratory judgment – he’s got to get a ruling to determine if he wins, can he run?”
However, the Republican establishment and others argue his efforts to appeal to the party’s conservative base – with such promises as building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and his willingness to dismiss critics as “dummies” – will make it hard for him to appeal to a large cross-section of voters and win in November.
Back in 2013, Trump said that Cruz was “perhaps not” eligible to run for president.
An NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist poll released earlier Sunday showed that Cruz leads Trump in Iowa by a margin of 28 percent to 24 percent. The real estate mogul has been at or near the top of the GOP polls essentially since he launched his campaign. “It’s that slight, slight chance that Cruz’s eligibility may be imperiled that Trump is sinisterly and shrewdly playing to…Trump hasn’t put Cruz in a corner just yet but has put him in, shall we say, a spot”.
The billionaire also attacked Cruz’s apparent shift on ethanol subsidies, the influence of wealthy campaign donors and renewed questions about the Texas senator’s Canadian birth.
Trump said in his administration, veterans will get better treatment than they are receiving now. You can’t do that with you know, three weeks to go, you’re not allowed to do that.
Trump was scheduled to appear at the historic Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake later on Saturday.
The relevance of this document is questionable in any case, since even if Mrs. Cruz had been eligible to vote, both she and Ted Cruz would still have had dual US citizenship.
“Republicans are going to have to ask themselves the question: ‘Do we want a candidate who could be tied up in court for two years?’ That’d be a big problem”, Trump told the Post. “I want to win fair and square”.
Cruz was born in Canada, but his mother was born in Delaware.
Cruz was born in Calgary and spent the first four years of his life in Canada – but he was born to an American citizen mother, who conferred American citizenship at birth.
One of the key questions for the Trump campaign is whether his supporters, many of whom have not previously taken part in the Iowa caucuses, will turn out of caucus night. He chalked up the comments about his eligibility to the political “silly season” and said it’s a non-issue. “Then we tell them they’re not getting the $150 billion because we don’t have it”, said Trump. And McCain, who has clashed with Cruz in the Senate, offered him no support last week saying in a radio interview that “I don’t know” if the Texas senator was a natural-born citizen. “Looking them in the eye”. While that’s a break from tradition, his campaign says he’s able to reach far more potential voters than candidates at smaller events can do.
Trump has a series of stops in Iowa planned for the next three weeks leading to the caucuses.
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“I just heard this: He was a citizen of Canada for a long time”, Trump said, referring to Cruz having citizenship in the United States and Canada until recently.
