He said her greatest achievement may have been avoiding prison for her use of a private email and personal server as secretary of state.
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“That pledge [to endorse the eventual nominee] was not a blanket commitment that if you go and slander and attack Heidi, that I’m going to nonetheless come like a puppy dog and say thank you very much for maligning my wife and maligning my father”, he said, according to television station WFAA in Dallas. Ted Cruz, one of only three Latinos in the Senate, failed Wednesday to bounce from his refusal to endorse Donald Trump at the convention, leaving many wondering if the Republican junior senator has put his 2018 political prospects in jeopardy.
Manafort told NBC’s “Today” on Thursday that Cruz “understood what the responsibilities are, someone in his position”.
In a final indignity, a Democratic super PAC called Correct the Record somehow obtained a draft of Trump’s speech and blasted it out to reporters almost four hours before he was to deliver it. The group’s president, Brad Woodhouse, crowed on Twitter that the leak amounted to political “malpractice” by the Trump campaign. Ted Cruz had some explaining to do to his state delegation Thursday morning.
As he appeared on stage Wednesday night, Cruz basked in a minute-long standing ovation.
Kinzinger said he was “blown away” with Cruz’s speech, where he urged Republicans to “vote their conscience” rather than say straight up to cast their ballots for Trump. “Her explanation was that Melania told her she admires Michelle Obama – and, somehow, that got confused and Mrs. Obama’s words became a key part of her speech”, Kimmel said. “Sit down shut up just the support the team'”.
That’s when the shouts began – “We want Trump!”
“I am doing what millions of Americans are doing I am watching, I am listening”, Cruz said. Speakers scheduled to appear before Trump’s grand finale include Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal; Tom Barrack, CEO of Colony Capital; Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin; and Jerry Falwell Jr., president of Liberty University and a well-known evangelical leader.
But he also exhorted people to vote in the November election “for candidates up and down the ticket who you trust to defend our freedom and to be faithful to the Constitution”.
Mr Trump later said he knew Mr Cruz would not endorse him but had let him speak anyway.
During the Q&A session, several delegates berated Cruz for failing to back Trump, at times yelling at the Senator and launching into chants of “Trump!”
Cruz took about a dozen questions here at what was originally scheduled to be a fairly traditional delegation breakfast.
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The billionaire real estate mogul told a cheering Cleveland crowd he would return the country to prosperity, proffering himself as a champion to an American working class angry they have been left behind in a changing world. “If there’s a campaign running around calling [Kasich] an embarrassment…one of those consequences might be that some of the people who wanted to participate in the campaign don’t want to anymore”.
