Donald Trump says he’s attacking Ted Cruz because Cruz started it.
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“Well, I have to go with my own thinking,” the Republican presidential candidate told Fox News’ Sean Hannity in an interview aired Thursday night. “Don’t forget, Ted attacked me and then I attacked him. But he started and he attacked me pretty viciously, and you know, first he was laying back, as we know. It was everybody — they said, in the wake. And frankly, he attacked me, Sean.”
Hannity had brought up criticism from conservative radio hosts Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin, and asked the billionaire businessman if he believed it was worth fixing his relationship with Cruz, which has gone from cordial to hostile in the weeks leading up to the Iowa caucuses.
“Rush has been great for me. Rush has been so amazing, and Mark’s been pretty good. I mean, Mark likes Ted and I think he likes me,” Trump said, adding that he believed himself to be doing the GOP a favor by bringing up Cruz’s eligibility to run for president. Cruz’s mother is an American, but some have said his birth in Canada means he can’t be president.
“The fact that he was born in Canada, he was a citizen of Canada until just 15 months ago, and he’s got a problem. We have constitutional lawyers that are coming out saying he can’t even run. So how can you have a candidate that you’re gonna pick as the Republican nominee, and he’s not allowed to run for the office of president?” Trump asked Hannity. “That’s a big problem.”
But Cruz “has some other problems,” Trump added, citing Cruz’s nondisclosure of loans from Goldman Sachs and Citibank on his 2012 Senate campaign documents.
Later in the same interview, Trump stopped bashing Cruz to brag about his support from the Republican establishment, which his GOP rivals have criticized. He also vowed that he would win the general election against Hillary Clinton, who he called a “more difficult challenge” than “wacky Bernie” Sanders.
“You saw my numbers in Florida, where I’m beating everybody, I’m at 48, and Bush and you know, who was a former governor is like at nine or 10, and Rubio the senator is at 11. He’s a very low number,” Trump said, referring to a recent Florida Atlantic University poll. “And plus I employ tremendous numbers of people in Florida. Florida loves Trump, and I love Florida. So I think I’m going to win Florida.”
Trump, in addition to his prediction that he would win in Pennsylvania and Ohio, called his home state of New York as a place where he believes his campaign would “have a really good chance of winning.”
“If we win New York, the whole ballgame is over, because nobody ever even anticipates winning New York because it has so many, you know, it’s so powerful in terms of the process that we’re talking about,” Trump concluded. “West Virginia, I heard it’s like a love-fest because they understand my feeling toward coal and everything else. But West Virginia, Virginia — I think I’m going to win states that are not on the agenda for Republicans to win.”
The Republican presidential candidate has won West Virginia in every election since 2000.
According to a RealClearPolitics average of national polls, Trump is the front-runner with 34.8 percentage points. His next closest competitor, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, has 18.8.
