The Trump-Cruz main event

This clash has been building for a few weeks after it was revealed that Cruz had told some donors behind closed doors that he didn’t believe Trump had the judgment to be president and that he expected Trump’s followers would eventually see the light and come over to his campaign. Trump responded as usual with an angry tweet and an insult on the trail. But the insult was odd. He said:

It sounded like a Vintage Trump non-sequitur and maybe it was. But it did have the effect of bringing up Cruz’s ethnic background as the son of a Hispanic immigrant. And when a man whose campaign is predicated on deporting millions of Hispanics, whom he routinely characterizes as criminals and deadbeats, is the one who slips it into the conversation it’s not much of a stretch to see it as a way to associate his foe with that negative image, particularly as you’re simultaneously suggesting that he might not be a “real” evangelical, being Cuban and all. (The truth is that there are tons of Latino evangelicals.)

Cruz didn’t take the bait and whatever fight was brewing at that point seemed to dissipate as everyone went off to celebrate the holidays. But over the past two weeks, as the polls started to show Cruz surpassing him in Iowa and moving up nationally, Trump has been trolling the senator hard. Significantly, he chose to go after him on the basis of his status as a “real American,” questioning his eligibility to be president since he was born in Canada to an American mother and his Cuban-born father (who is now a naturalized American citizen).

It’s yet another natural line of attack from the man who not only demonizes immigrants but is revered among the denizens of the right wing fever swamps for his relentless pursuit of President Obama’s birth certificate back in 2012. Of course the King of the Birthers is questioning his rival’s eligibility to be president. But he’s doing it in the most lugubrious way possible, by saying he doesn’t care about such trivialities —  he has no need to win by Cruz being disqualified —  but he cares about his good friend Ted and he just thinks he should get this all straightened out before the Democrats use it against him.

This one took. Cruz has been pushed off message, legal scholars are arguing loudly and publicly about the issue, and even some of the also-rans like Carly Fiorina have made sad attempts to be relevant by offering comments on the subject. When it comes to trolling, nobody should ever underestimate Trump. He has a gift.

But Cruz has some moves of his own. Earlier this week on the Howie Carr radio show he quipped that Donald Trump should stop playing “Born in the USA” and play “New York, New York” instead. He said Trump “comes from New York and he embodies New York values. The rest of the country knows exactly what New York values are, and I gotta say, they’re not Iowa values and they’re not New Hampshire values.” The implication was obvious: Trump wasn’t born in America either — at least, not Real America.

There was immediate speculation about what Cruz meant by “New York Values,” and Kellyann Conway, president of one of his well-heeled Super PACs called Keep the Promise I explained:

Conway is a well-known GOP pollster and strategist, and it’s highly unlikely that the efficacy of this attack wasn’t well researched. The New York Post reported that the line had been tested on Iowa voters. (The idea that these city slickers are all into the Benjamins is kind of funny, however, considering that Conway’s Super PAC is funded by a major donor who happens to hail from NYC.)

Frankly, Conway was being a little bit disingenuous about what Cruz was getting at in any case. This is actually a well-worn right-wing trope that dates back to early days of the conservative movement’s culture war. Recall the famous words of former UN Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick who railed against the “San Francisco Democrats” in her 1984 GOP convention speech. The term was so freighted with images of allegedly decadent liberal culture, from hippies to gays, that she didn’t have to even mention them. Anyway, the age-old divide between the country folk and the city folk is always in play to some degree, what with the Republican Party being dominant in rural America in recent years. Cruz knows his demographic.