Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is stepping up his attacks on 2016 GOP rival Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, declaring on Monday: “Everybody hates Ted.”
“He’s very unpopular in Washington,” Mr. Trump said on “Fox and Friends.”
“When you have somebody that can’t get along with anybody in Washington, you’re not going to get deals done,” Mr. Trump said. “I mean, you have to get deals done - we can’t always keep invoking executive orders like Obama does, [because] he can’t get deals.”
“You get Congress, you get ’em together, you get everybody together in a room, you cajole, you get along, you have dinner, and you make deals,” he said. “And you know, everybody hates Ted. It’s a very tough thing. They all hate him…for a lot of reasons. But they all hate him.”
“And by the way, he’s attacked me, so when he attacks me, as you know I’m a counter-puncher,” he said. “You’ve all seen a lot of people attack me and you see where they are right now. But he attacked me first.”
Mr. Cruz has said recently that Mr. Trump embodies “New York values” - a distinction Mr. Cruz said Mr. Trump himself made during a 1999 interview.
“He explained in his views that he was pro-choice, he supported partial birth abortion, open to gay marriage, and his explanation for all that, he said, I’m a New Yorker, I’m from Manhattan,” Mr. Cruz said this week on “Fox News Sunday.”
“It strikes me as curious now that he is displayed such outrage that anyone would even acknowledge that there’s a particular political view,” Mr. Cruz said. “And I would point out it’s a view echoed by far left liberal Democratic politicians like Andrew Cuomo, Bill de Blasio, Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump has supported those candidates and supported their positions on a lot of issues.”
• David Sherfinski can be reached at dsherfinski@washingtontimes.com.
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