“Yet when that fight was being fought, Donald was nowhere to be found. If you didn’t stand up and fight amnesty when the stakes were live or die, when the stakes were do we lose this permanently or do we win, then I would suggest as voters you have reason to doubt the credibility of the promises of a political candidate who discovers the issue after he announces for president”.
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Days after the last GOP debate where Trump and Cruz crossed paths again, both are still talking tough. “It’s not a good thing for the country”, said Mr. Trump, who has led Republican opinion polls for months.
In a sign of their increasing separation from the rest of the field, Trump and Cruz have spent the past week focused on tearing each other down, ending the de facto alliance they had maintained to this point in the race. I kept saying come on Ted.
Before Cruz even opened the door to a particularly raucous crowd in a pasta restaurant off the main town square, his top surrogate, former House Speaker Bill O’Brien, used the phrase behind Cruz’s line of attack: “New York values”.
“I have to do what I have to do”, Trump said.
But many believe that even if Trump is falling short when it comes to building a get-out-the-vote effort, his supporters are so enthusiastic that it won’t much matter.
When pressed on his 1999 interview with NBC, Trump pivoted instead to bash Cruz as a “hypocrite” over taking money from New Yorkers.
During an interview with George Stephanopoulos on last Sunday’s episode of This Week, Donald Trump said that he doesn’t think Cruz has a “great chance” of winning and added that he is a “nasty guy”, no one likes him, and that it is hard to make deals with a guy like him.
“We shouldn’t have a whole lotta folks running”, said Henry Barbour, a Republican national committeeman from Mississippi. “If he wants to engage in insults that’s his problem, I like Donald Trump, I respect Donald Trump”.
The video then ends with a coin flipping in the air and the caption “Which Cruz will you choose?”
“I hang onto every word he says”, says Kim, 58, a retired nurse, who walks her pit bull everyday wearing her Trump hat and gleefully described receiving an Ivanka Trump perfume and lotion set for Christmas, along with Christmas and New Year’s cards from Trump himself.
Larry Weigel, an accountant who attended the session, said he’d already called 60 people and lined up commitments from seven of the 25 people he was aiming to get to caucus for Trump. “All of a sudden he wants to build a wall”. Marco Rubio is in second place.
Cruz is also looking ahead to Super Tuesday on March 1, also nicknamed the “SEC Primary” after the college-football conference, when voters in several southern states, including Cruz’s home state of Texas, go to the polls.
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He alluded to Mr. Cruz being hypocritical, noting that he has raised millions of dollars from New Yorkers.
