Liar, liar, pants on fire.
If there is a single phrase to capture the current state of the Republican presidential race, this schoolyard taunt would suffice.
“Ted Cruz is a liar,” read the subject line of an email blasted out to Marco Rubio’s supporters by his campaign earlier this week. “First it was lying about Marco on fundamental issues like life and marriage; now Cruz and his supporters’ attempts to slander and distort Marco’s record have reached a new low.”
Donald Trump blasted Cruz as the “single biggest liar” in the most recent Republican debate. Speaking to reporters Monday, Trump used the words lie, lying or liar at least a half a dozen times in one 90-second answer, all to describe the Texas senator.
“He’s a lying guy,” Trump elaborated. “A really lying guy.”
Cruz and Trump have engaged in a particularly heated war of words, with the billionaire hitting the Texan with a cease-and-desist letter over an abortion-related ad. Cruz’s attorney insists the ad is true and truth is an absolute defense legally.
“Ted Cruz has already had one of his ads pulled off the air concerning Sen. Rubio because it was totally false … he was forced to apologize to Dr. Ben Carson for fraudulently stealing his votes in Iowa, and was embarrassed by his phony voter violation form,” Trump said in a statement Wednesday. “He is a liar and these ads and statements made by Cruz are clearly desperate moves by a guy who is tanking in the polls.”
Cruz might point to his rise in the NBC News/Wall Street Journal to challenge the veracity of Trump’s last point. The businessman is no stranger to having the truthfulness of his own claims questioned.
What is going on here? The race for the Republican presidential nomination is taking on an even uglier and more desperate tone. Competing with other candidates for both conservative votes and establishment support, Rubio has been hit on all sides. Now the Florida senator is starting to hit back. He sank from a stronger-than-expected third place in Iowa to a disappointing fifth in New Hampshire, so he is looking to rebound in South Carolina Saturday.
Cruz is fighting both Rubio and Trump for votes. He won Iowa, managed to notch a distant third place in New Hampshire and would like to challenge Trump in South Carolina. The South is key for him to have any path to the nomination. The senator also appears to be getting under his rivals’ skin, as evidenced by their increasingly snarky references to him.
Jeb Bush is trying to just keep his campaign alive. His brother, former President George W. Bush, and South Carolina’s senior Sen. Lindsey Graham have rallied to his side. The former Florida governor is going after his former protégé Rubio for votes and is jousting with Trump to look tougher and contrast his family’s dignified reputation with the reality TV star’s more outlandish personae.
Before ending his campaign after a disastrous sixth place showing in New Hampshire, Chris Christie made Rubio look silly in a debate and spent weeks dismissing the freshman senator’s preparedness for the presidency. Christie called Rubio the “boy in the bubble” before his own bubble burst.
This is a lot of material that can be used in Democratic ads against the eventual nominee. It will at least dull the impact of the vanquished primary candidates’ endorsements.
Ben Carson has mostly kept above the fray, especially as his own standing in the polls has diminished, aside from accusing the Cruz campaign of dirty tricks in Iowa. But during Wednesday night’s Republican town hall forum on CNN, the retired neurosurgeon urged his opponents to stop tearing each other apart. Carson blamed intraparty feuds for the GOP’s failure to defeat President Obama in 2012.
“We have to stop finding ways to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory,” Carson said. He’s a soft-spoken man, so it may be hard to hear him over the din of the Republican circular firing squad.
