Two days after finishing second to Ted Cruz in the Iowa caucuses, Donald Trump is accusing the Texas senator of fraud and demanding that either a “new election” take place in the Hawkeye State or that its results be “nullified”.
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Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has accused rival Ted Cruz of stealing a victory in the Iowa caucuses and called for another vote or nullification of Cruz’s win.
It’s a marked change in tone for second-place Trump, who until now said he was proud of his results considering it’s his first political campaign.
Asked whether the campaign planned to file a formal complaint, Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski said: “Wait and see”. “What he did was unthinkable”.
Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz gave his harshest assessment yet of Donald Trump’s candidacy on Wednesday, saying the Iowa caucus runner-up is throwing a “Trumpertantrum” after his loss.
The Cruz campaign didn’t immediately respond to the criticism from Trump, who holds commanding leads in polls of likely voters in next week’s first-in-the-nation New Hampshire primary.
Instead, Rubio came in a very strong third – a third that was very almost second, as he crept up on Trump’s vote total.
However, the race now appears to have narrowed down to Trump, Cruz, Rubio, Carson, Bush and Christie.
“I think some people were disappointed that I didn’t go into the debate”, he told reporters. “When they said Ben Carson is out of the race and come vote for him, I thought it was awful”.
Trump decided not to participate in the last Republican party debate, opting out of the nationally televised clash over a woman anchor he calls “biased”. “Senator Cruz’s claims about CNN are false”, the network said in a statement Wednesday evening. “They said, ‘No, no, his is, but yours isn’t.’ And I said, ‘Oh, that’s wonderful.’ I didn’t understand that”.
“In retrospect, we could have done much better with the ground game”, Trump said, in an apparent slight to his Iowa state director Chuck Laudner.
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Spokesman Rick Tyler earlier told MSNBC that Iowans are used to getting similar ones and that the campaign “modeled ours after them”.
