Right-leaning pundits who have previously heaped praise on Donald Trump’s unconventional and politically incorrect presidential campaign are breaking with the GOP front-runner now that he’s focusing his attacks on primary rival Sen. Ted Cruz.
Trump’s oft-repeated charge that the Texas senator may not be eligible to run because he was born in Calgary, Canada, has proven to be a particularly strong turnoff for people like talk radio host Laura Ingraham and Fox News’ Sean Hannity.
“I see no issue here for Ted Cruz,” Hannity, who has enthusiastically backed the real estate mogul’s candidacy, said this month during his television program.
Trump has made Cruz’s birth status a campaign issue since at least March, 2015, but he has gone extra hard on the topic in recent weeks, saying in interviews that the matter poses a “very precarious” problem for the GOP.
Though he avoided criticizing Trump directly, Hannity later accused his Fox colleague Geraldo Rivera of “going birther ballistic” for suggesting there may be some legitimacy to the former reality TV star’s questions.
Laura Ingraham, who has also been a constant and vocal supporter of Trump’s campaign, has been similarly dismissive of the GOP front-runner’s line of attack, while also notably defensive of Cruz.
“There’s no issue whatsoever. [Cruz] has dual citizenship, because his mom is a U.S. citizen, so he gets naturalized citizen as a result of that,” the talk radio host said.
The Conservative Review, which is headed by radio host Mark Levin and author Michelle Malkin, has for the most part avoided publishing anything challenging Trump’s candidacy. However, that appeared to change this week after the casino tycoon increased the number of “birther” attacks on Cruz.
“After spending an entire week discussing the Cruz citizenship issue, can’t we have a debate over whether we’ve properly vetted the frontrunner on some of the critical issues facing our nation?” wrote Daniel Horowitz.
In December, radio host Rush Limbaugh finally started to question Trump’s candidacy after the billionaire businessman described Cruz as a “maniac.”
“My questioning here about the way Trump has gone after Cruz here, calling him a maniac, refusing to work with people in the Senate. The reason I’m focusing on that, folks, because that’s so unlike Trump,” a disheartened Limbaugh said in December. “I mean, that’s a huge mistake.”
“[For] any of you who are holding out hope that Trump is a genuine conservative, a genuine conservative, even in the Republican field, would not go after Cruz this way. So that just raised a red flag for me,” he added.
For the Daily Caller’s Matt Lewis, new attacks against Trump from the right signal that something else has been going on all along.
“It’s very clear to me that a lot of the folks in the populist entertainment wing of the GOP abdicated any responsibility in policing the right, and instead empowered Donald Trump — all the while, misguidedly assuming he would fade away,” Lewis wrote.
“I’m not sure why they did this. But, I think, there are two possible scenarios: They always thought they could use Donald Trump as a sort of stalking horse for Ted Cruz,” he added.
The other scenario, he wrote, is that, “The talk radio wing did not initially realize Ted Cruz could win. As such, they were willing to tolerate Donald Trump’s demagogic rhetoric in exchange for his work creating chaos, taking down the establishment, and tackling political correctness. It was only after they realized that Ted Cruz had a legitimate shot at the nomination that they decided to voice concern over the fact that Donald Trump (gasp!) wasn’t really a conservative.”
Luckily for Trump, and despite being questioned now by the likes of Ingraham, Limbaugh and Hannity, the GOP front-runner can still count on author Ann Coulter to back his every move.
“NYT: Cruz was born outside the U.S. to 1 American parent: “Under the Constitution this makes him a ‘natural born citizen.'” Absolutely false,” she said on social media last week. “Same lawyers who said anchor babies are in the Constitution now tell us being born outside U.S to 1 American parent = natural born citizen.”
These remarks stand in sharp contrast to when she said in 2013, “TED CRUZ CAN RUN FOR PRESIDENT! I worried on @seanhannity @ his Calgary birth, But his mother was a US citizen, so he was born a citizen.”
In the end, however, the Canadian “birther” issue is little more than a “stupid, awful spat,” according to Reason’s Peter Suderman.
“The Trump/Cruz squabble is mind-numbingly stupid at almost every level. It is not a contest of ideas or policies, but a battle of attitude and insult, of culture-war positioning and social media put-downs. In other words, it reflects the awful current state of the GOP primary,” he wrote.
