“I want to be crystal clear: these attacks are garbage”, Mr Cruz, 45, said in a Facebook post. “It is complete and utter lies”, the GOP presidential candidate told reporters after appearing at an Oshkosh, Wis., town hall.
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The Enquirer article doesn’t name the alleged Cruz lovers, but includes pixellated photos of five women with black bars across the eyes. The tweet was in response to an advertisement from an outside group opposed to Mr Trump’s candidacy that featured a risque photo of Mr Trump’s wife, Melania.
Trump and Cruz are in an intense competition to win enough delegates to claim the GOP nomination.
The magazine in 2007 broke the politically and personally damaging story of 2004 Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards’s extramarital affair as his wife battled cancer.
“Donald, when he’s losing, when he’s scared, decides to pedal sleaze and slime”, Cruz told reporters Friday.
The result is that Cruz, who long called Trump a friend and insisted he would support the Republican nominee in November, started to back away from that pledge.
On Wednesday night, Trump escalated things when he re-tweeted side-by-side images of Cruz’s wife, with an unflattering grimace, and Melania in a gauzy, glamorous pose.
“Donald Trump’s consistently disgraceful behavior is beneath the office we are seeking and we are not going to follow”, Cruz wrote in a Facebook post, the Daily Beast reported.
Stone, on Twitter, said “Lyin’ Ted is even lyin’ about me”.
The exchange came after a back-and-forth about Trump’s retweet of an opinion that his wife, Melania, is more attractive than Heidi Cruz. Hostilities reached a new high Friday when Cruz accused Trump and “his henchmen” of stoking false rumors that he’d cheated on his wife.
Earlier Friday on CNN, Adriana Cohen of the Boston Herald, a Trump supporter, accused Cruz communications director Amanda Carpenter of being one of the women.
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“Her entire career has been spent working against everything Ted Cruz says that he stands for”, Pierson said, after running through a list of affiliations. “Donald you’re a sniveling coward, and leave Heidi the hell alone”, Cruz said. “If Donald wants to get in a character fight, he’s better off sticking with me because Heidi is way out of his league”, an nearly word-for-word reference to a line from the 1995 movie starring Michael Douglas.
