While Ted Cruz has been willing to engage in back-and-forth debates with some of his GOP rivals—most notably and recently his Senate colleague Marco Rubio—the Texas Republican has refrained from disagreeing or distinguishing himself from the party’s frontrunner, Donald Trump. At least publicly, that is. The New York Times reported Thursday that Cruz recently criticized Trump at a private fundraiser:
It wasn’t a particularly harsh criticism from Cruz, but the warning is a shift from his public strategy of not hitting the New York real-estate mogul. Just a day before the Times story broke, Cruz told MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough he wouldn’t criticize Trump for his proposal to ban Muslims from entering the country.
“It is amazing how eager the media is, I mean, the number one question I get, day in and day out, is ‘Please attack Donald Trump,'” Cruz said. “My approach to Trump has been the same as my approach to every other Republican candidate, which is I’m not interested in personal insults and mudslinging.”
Asked about the Times report after a speech Thursday in Washington, Cruz told reporters, “I’m not going to comment on what I may or may not have said at a private fundraiser.” The Cruz campaign also released a statement that did not deal directly with what the Times reported, under the headline, “Cruz Responds to Misleading New York Times Story.”
“In the course of a Presidential election, the voters are going to make a decision about every candidate,” reads the statement. “And ultimately the decision is, who has the right judgment and the right experience to serve as Commander in Chief? Every one of us who is running is being assessed by the voters under that metric, and that is exactly why we have a democratic election to make that determination.”
What, exactly, was misleading about the Times story? THE WEEKLY STANDARD has asked the Cruz campaign to explain but has not yet received a response.
Update: Catherine Frazier, a spokeswoman for the Cruz campaign, replied via email. “The headline says he attacked Trump,” Frazier wrote. “Not true, Cruz was simply saying that judgement is a question for all candidates running for president.”
It’s not clear the headline of the online report ever had the word “attack” in it. Frazier did not deny the details of the Times report, nor did she deny that Cruz specifically called into question the judgment of Donald Trump and Ben Carson.
Meanwhile, reporter Maggie Haberman of the Times has posted the audio of Cruz’s comments online. Listen to them here.
