Presidential candidate Donald Trump took a beating Monday from conservative talk radio hosts Mark Levin and Rush Limbaugh for attacking Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.
It started last week following a private fundraiser in which an attendee recorded and released comments Cruz had made questioning Trump’s sense of judgment.
The billionaire responded to the off-the-record criticism multiple times last week and again on Fox News Sunday, saying Cruz was a “bit of a maniac” for how he has dealt with Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell. Cruz responded on Twitter by linking to a music video performance of “Maniac” from the movie “Flashdance.”
On Monday the two nationally syndicated radio hosts came to Cruz’s aid, bashing Trump for tearing into a fellow anti-establishment candidate to their combined audiences of millions.
Limbaugh fired first on his midday show, saying Trump has “decided to go after Cruz in the way the establishment Republican go after Cruz, in the way the media goes after Cruz, in the way Democrats go after Cruz … A genuine conservative, even in the Republican field, would not go after Cruz this way. So that just raised a red flag to me.”
Levin laid out three reasons Trump “really screwed up this weekend, big time, trifecta. He said Trump’s assertion that Cruz has been bought out by oil companies just because he opposes ethanol and is from the Lone Star State are “stupid.”
Next, Levin defended Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s questioning of affirmative action in oral arguments. Levin questioned any candidate who cast doubt on the stalwart conservative justice’s jurisprudence.
Finally, Levin, like Limbaugh, condemned Trump’s attacks on how Cruz has taken on the Senate leadership in his first term in the upper chamber.
“We agree with what Ted Cruz has done with McConnell in the Senate. We despise the Republican establishment, that’s why amazingly there’s so much energy behind the Trump campaign. How does he [Trump] miss it?” Levin concluded.
