Donald Trump isn’t worried about primary competition from Sen. Ted Cruz because national polling shows the senator is not a “serious contender,” the GOP front-runner’s campaign spokeswoman said Monday.
“If you look at the numbers nationally, you will see [Cruz is] not really a serious contender and Mr. Trump is leading by a wide margin in several states,” Katrina Pierson said after MSNBC’s Thomas Roberts asked her if the Trump campaign sees the Texas senator as real competition.
Trump currently leads Cruz in Iowa by only two percentage points, according to a survey released this week by Quinnipiac University.
The Texas lawmaker leads Trump in favorables, as the Quinnipiac poll also showed this week that voters said they’d more readily vote for Cruz than they would the current Republican front-runner.
Pierson and Roberts also discussed Trump’s oft-repeated charge that Cruz’s Canadian heritage could become a real problem for the senator later in the 2016 primary.
“The only reason we’re having the discussion about Senator Cruz is he responded directly to Donald Trump about the media report. When they raise the question on the Cruz citizenship, and naturalized citizenship for that matter, the question was asked of Mr. Trump and he even said that he didn’t think it was an issue and that he had spoken to Senator Cruz about it,” she said.
Trump has hinted since at least March, 2015, that Cruz’s foreign born status could be a stumbling block on the senator’s road to the White House. The casino tycoon has said more recently that Cruz’s Canadian background could be “very precarious” for the GOP.
Trump also said Monday of the issue, “Whether you like it or not, Ted has to figure it out because … you can’t have the person that gets the nomination be sued like Hillary might be sued.”
Pierson assured Roberts that the Trump campaign is merely asking and answering questions.
“[I]t’s not really a birth issue,” she said. “Everyone knows the senator was born in Canada. Everyone believes that the senator is a United States citizen. The question is, can he be tied up in a lawsuit?”
“Because according to the time he was born, there might be some requirements that his mother may have had to go through and maybe didn’t. That’s the question. That’s the question Democrats are raising,” she added.
Pierson stressed that if the Trump campaign were really worried about Cruz, there are a number of issues that they’d attack him over, including, “the differences between the two on illegal immigration, the differences between the two on free trade … [and] the differences between Syrian refugees.”
