She says Cruz should have endorsed the ticket as he pledged to do as a candidate in the GOP primary. In an unpredictable year when reality often has meant ratings, Trump may be right.
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“This isn’t a team sport”, Cruz said at one point. Iowa delegate Cecil Stinemetz said he continues to believe Trump is “the worst nominee that we have put forward for the Republican Party in the history of the Republican Party”.
“I’m not going to get into criticizing or attacking Donald Trump, but I am not in the habit of supporting people who attack my wife and my father”.
Next, Trump praised the reporting of the National Enquirer, which had written a piece suggested that Cruz’s father had been photographed with Lee Harvey Oswald, President Kennedy’s assassin. “We all made a pledge that we were gonna support our nominee. He’s politically dead”, said B.J. Van Gundy, a longtime GOP activist in Georgia. Ted Cruz, was booed off the stage for refusing to endorse Trump and urging Republicans instead to “vote your conscience”.
Before Cruz spoke, the mood among the Texas delegates who had gathered in the downtown Marriott was conciliatory.
Soraya Zamora, a south Texas delegate, stood and pleaded with Cruz to rally behind Trump, pointing to his pledge to back the eventual nominee.
The Massachusetts Democrat says “I think if it were me, I would know it by now”.
“It’s considerably different. Clinton is running on a campaign of competency, of policy-oriented perspectives, whereas Donald Trump has pulled out from his pocket a lot of personal characteristics from people”, Tammen said.
“After four years of Hillary Clinton, what do we have?”
Trump reinforced his position from the convention stage, saying the United States has been “picking up the cost” of NATO’s defenses for too long. “One after another”, he said.
Trump’s speech was interrupted at one point by a protester from Code Pink, a women’s activist group aimed at putting an end to USA wars, and he waited to continue speaking until police removed her from the arena. The candidate has provided relatively few, and thin, policy proposals. Cruz responded by calling Trump a “sniveling coward”.
When a secretary of state illegally stores her emails on a private server, deletes 33,000 of them so that authorities can not see her crime, it puts the country at risk, Trump said, adding corruption has reached a level like never before.
Pence is heartily on board the Trump bandwagon; Cruz isn’t yet, nor are many of his supporters in Cleveland. “So to every parent who dreams for their child and every child who dreams for their future, I say these words to you tonight”, he said. But he also took it a step further by telling the delegates to vote “your conscience” in November, to which he received a booming chorus of boos from Trump backers.
“We either stand for shared principles or we’re not worth anything”, he said before making a reference to butting heads with former House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
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Then one of the event’s highlights, a speech by Trump’s wife on Monday night caused controversy over plagiarism because she used some lines that were similar to passages in an address by first lady Michelle Obama in 2008.
