GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump says he’d be a better deal-maker than 2016 rival Sen. Ted Cruz, who Mr. Trump labeled a “nasty guy” viewed skeptically by his peers in the U.S. Senate.
“I think the establishment actually is against me, but really coming online,” Mr. Trump said in an excerpt of an interview with CNN to air Monday. “Because they see me, as opposed to Cruz who is a nasty guy who can’t get along with anybody.”
“At a certain point, [you] got to make deals,” Mr. Trump said. “We can’t have a guy who stands in the middle of the Senate floor and every other senator thinks he’s a wack job, right? You have to make deals. You have to get along. That’s the purpose of what our founders created.”
“And Ted cannot get along with anybody. He’s a nasty person,” he said. “You don’t see that. And even when he was supportive of me, I kept saying, watch what’s going to happen, he’s a nasty guy. He brought it up at the debate. He started it; I finished it. But he … started getting very bad at the debate.”
Mr. Cruz has said recently that the “Washington establishment” is abandoning Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida for Mr. Trump in the 2016 race. The Cruz campaign also released a recent ad that attacked Mr. Trump over the issue of eminent domain, or the taking of private property for public use in exchange for compensation.
The ad said that Mr. Trump “colluded with Atlantic City insiders to bulldoze the home of an elderly widow for a limousine parking lot at his casino.”
Mr. Trump said Mr. Cruz is telling “lies” and defended the use of eminent domain.
“I mean, he said I knocked down some woman’s home; he’s got bulldozers — I never knocked down her home,” Mr. Trump said. “She didn’t want it.”
“And the words eminent domain - you wouldn’t have roads, you wouldn’t have airports, you wouldn’t have hospitals, you wouldn’t have schools,” he said. “By the way, the Keystone pipeline is all based on eminent domain. You wouldn’t move that thing 10 feet without taking that land on which it sits. And by the way, all those people get paid a lot of money.”
“It’s not like they take it,” he said. “They take it and pay a lot of money. But he makes a big deal out of eminent domain. You wouldn’t have a country. You wouldn’t have one highway in this country if you don’t have [it]. You wouldn’t have a railroad. You wouldn’t have anything.”
• David Sherfinski can be reached at dsherfinski@washingtontimes.com.
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