New York Times
By Matt Flegenheimer
February 29, 2016
On
the eve of what could be the most important day of his candidacy,
Senator Ted Cruz on Monday took furious aim at Donald J. Trump’s
signature issue — his hard-line immigration
positions — suggesting that Mr. Trump was insulting the intelligence of
his supporters.
Noting
that Mr. Trump had recently said that he “loved the poorly educated,”
Mr. Cruz said the Republican front-runner in the polls seemed to be
hoodwinking his supporters.
“Donald
Trump’s record on immigration is terrible,” the senator told reporters.
“Nobody who supports open-border Democrats for 40 years can care about
securing the borders.”
Mr.
Cruz seized on a BuzzFeed report on Monday that questioned Mr. Trump’s
commitment to his immigration stances. According to the report, Mr.
Trump raised doubts about
standing by his own views during an off-the-record meeting in early
January with the editorial board of The New York Times and Dean Baquet,
the executive editor of The Times.
Andrew
Rosenthal, editorial page editor of The Times, did not comment on the
contents of the meeting, but said that if Mr. Trump “wants to call up
and ask us to release
this transcript, he’s free to do that and then we can decide what we
would do.”
Before
a rollicking home-state crowd inside an auditorium here, Mr. Cruz on
Monday called on Mr. Trump to ask for the details of the meeting to be
released.
“If
you’re sitting in Manhattan telling The New York Times that you’re
lying to the voters, the voters have a right to know,” Mr. Cruz said to
cheers.
In
one sense, Mr. Cruz was walking a delicate line. On Sunday, one of his
chief allies in the Senate, Jeff Sessions of Alabama, endorsed Mr.
Trump. Mr. Cruz has cited
Mr. Sessions as someone who stood “shoulder to shoulder” with him to
stifle immigration legislation in 2013.
Asked
whether the endorsement undercut his argument against Mr. Trump, Mr.
Cruz was careful to avoid criticizing Mr. Sessions directly.
“Jeff
Sessions is a good man, he is a good friend and he is a principled
senator who fights passionately for his causes,” Mr. Cruz said. “Donald
Trump’s record is open
for everyone to examine. It is a fact that for four decades Donald
Trump has supported open-border Democrats.”
In
his remarks, Mr. Cruz also folded in an attack on the immigration
record of Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, while still managing a hit on
Mr. Trump.
“When
Marco Rubio was leading the Gang of Eight, Donald Trump was funding the
Gang of Eight,” Mr. Cruz said of the 2013 legislation that Mr. Rubio
helped engineer.
“Sick!” someone shouted from the crowd.
At his news conference, Mr. Cruz said his was “the only campaign that has a shot of beating Donald Trump on Super Tuesday.”
He
also dismissed any discussion of a brokered convention, suggesting that
Mr. Rubio and Gov. John Kasich of Ohio would be doing Republicans no
favors if they pledged
to fight into the summer to prevent Mr. Trump’s nomination.
“A
campaign sticking around when you can’t win a state and you’re not
amassing delegates — that doesn’t stop Donald Trump,” he said. “We need
to come together. And I think
after Super Tuesday, we will see this race become more and more a
two-man race.”
He described a contested convention as “the great hope of the Republican establishment.”
“It
is how they are drowning away their sorrows,” he said. “They say,
‘We’ll have a brokered convention and all these crazy voters will go one
way and then we’ll step
in with all of our money and we will anoint our white knight to ride in
and save the day.’”
He concluded: “We’re not going to have a brokered convention. The voters are going to decide.”
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
No comments:
Post a Comment