Fresh off a victory in the Iowa caucuses, a feisty Ted Cruz unloaded on his rival Donald Trump Wednesday afternoon, asking repeatedly who the New Hampshire frontrunner might call “stupid” next.
“You know, he accused the people of Iowa of being stupid. In fact, he skipped the Iowa debate,” Cruz said during a press availability in New Hampshire. “It makes you wonder if his next step is to accuse the people of New Hampshire of being stupid — if he plans to skip the New Hampshire debate, and after that if he plans to accuse the people of South Carolina of being stupid and skip the South Carolina debate.”
Trump wondered aloud during a November campaign event how Iowa voters could be so “stupid” as to believe parts of fellow candidate Ben Carson’s backstory. At the time, Carson was challenging Trump for poll supremacy in Iowa.
Cruz’s barbs Wednesday were the sort of pointed attacks against Trump that the Texas senator previously had been reluctant to make. It wasn’t until the lead-up to caucus day, particularly during a mid-January debate, that Cruz began to challenge the GOP frontrunner publicly. Now, it’s no holds barred.
“It seems his reaction to everything is to throw a fit, to engage in insults. And I understand that Donald finds it very hard to lose,” he said in reference to a Twitter fit Trump threw Wednesday, during which he challenged the legitimacy of Cruz’s Iowa victory. Part of Trump’s rationale was that Cruz misrepresented his position on healthcare policy.
During his presser, Cruz doubled down.
“Donald does not want to defend his lifelong support for socialized medicine, for Bernie Sanders-style socialized medicine. Donald wants to expand Obamacare, so that the federal government is in charge of your health care and my health care, is in charge of your doctor and my doctor,” he said. “And he’s entitled to that view. It’s a view that would be very welcome in the Democratic Party.”
Trump has prevaricated on his public policy preferences for health care in the past, though he has said he would replace the law with a system that relies mostly on the private sector.
It’s fair to call the exact plan Terrificare.
