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| Jerry Falwell and Tinky-Winky |
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) slammed Donald Trump on Saturday, casting him as a false conservative and questioning the real estate mogul’s temperament and judgment.
Cruz’s remarks open up a new front between the two Republican front-runners, with Cruz aggressively hitting the New Yorker for the first time while on the campaign trail.
“Donald’s record does not match what he says as a candidate,” Cruz told reporters in Fort Mill, S.C.,
“It seems Donald has a lot of nervous energy. For whatever reason Donald doesn’t react well when he’s going down in the polls,” Cruz said.
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Trump escalated his attacks on Cruz in a series of tweets Saturday morning, stating that additional lawsuits will be filed questioning Cruz's eligibility to be president, knocking him for not reporting loans from Goldman Sachs and Citibank that he used to fund his 2012 Senate campaign. Trump said Goldman “owns” Cruz and he will “Do anything they demand.” Cruz’s wife is on leave from her job as an executive director at Goldman.
Trump called Cruz the “ultimate hypocrite,” linking to a story about how Cruz raised money at the New York home of two wealthy gay businessmen.
Cruz pointed to the Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll that shows him beating Trump in a two-man race — although Trump leads the entire field.
“And I imagine it pulled him out of bed this morning and sent him tweeting and tweeting and tweeting. I think in terms of a commander-in-chief, we ought to have someone who isn’t springing out of bed to tweet in a frantic response to the latest polls,” Cruz said.
“I think the American people are looking for a commander-in-chief who is stable and steady and a calm hand to keep this country safe.”
Cruz’s campaign also went on the offensive, tweeting and emailing a video of Trump on “Meet the Press” in 1999 where Trump said he is “very pro-choice” and talks about gay marriage and gays serving in the military through the lens of someone who lives in New York.
“I lived in New York City and Manhattan my whole life, so my views are a little bit different than if I lived in Iowa,” Trump said. Cruz said this week that Trump represents “New York values,” stating during the debate that they are “socially liberal or pro-abortion or pro- gay-marriage, focus around money and the media.”
Trump offered an emotional defense of city, speaking movingly of the Sept. 11 attacks. Cruz apologized on Friday to New Yorkers - for their liberal elected officials.
Cruz said Saturday that the “New York values” phrase came from Trump himself.
During the 1999 interview Trump described New York values as “being very, very very pro choice, supporting partial birth abortion and being open to gay marriage. That’s what Donald Trump described as New York values,” Cruz said.
A Cruz aide said that the campaign will attempt to highlight contrasts between Cruz and Trump when it comes to “guiding principles” and records of accomplishment. This person said the campaign wants to point out differences between the two that show Cruz is “better prepared, that people can be confident that he has guiding principles to make critical decisions as president and commander in chief ,” this person said.
“I don’t think the voters have that same confidence in what Donald Trump’s guiding principles are other than he would make a deal and compromise on any given issue, and then he has policy proposals that just don’t seem serious,” this person said.
When asked why Cruz decided to go after Trump this week, the person said, “We have three weeks to go” until the Iowa caucuses.
Cruz’s surrogates have also gone on the offensive, highlighting Trump’s lifestyle and multiple marriages.
Cruz has spent the entirety of his campaign trying to gain the support of evangelical Christians and tea party conservatives. One of Cruz’s rivals for religious voters, Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, arrived at a tea party convention in Myrtle Beach, S.C., several hours before Cruz was set to speak. In the New York values debate, Huckabee might have been expected to pick Cruz’s side: In his pre-campaign book “God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy,” Huckabee described New York as the capital of “Bubble-ville,” a city of filthy streets and empty churches. But Huckabee, who has watched Cruz capture many of the social conservative voters that backed his 2008 campaign, repeatedly defended Trump.
“I think Donald Trump did a great job the other night of talking about the kind of values that we saw and the sacrifice of New Yorkers after 9/11,” said Huckabee, recalling his own visit to the “smoldering” World Trade Center. “I think everybody in the world was just absolutely amazed at how the people of that city pulled together and rebuilt.”
“New York politics are different than they are in Arkansas, but it’s not my duty to explain them,” he said. “Look, if you want to talk about candidates who’ve switched positions, you’ve got a bunch of them out there who’ve changed on the Trans Pacific Partnership, and on ethanol, and on foreign policy. Donald Trump’s positions, if they’ve changed, have changed over the last 15 years. Not the last 15 minutes.”