The latest round of the epic battle between Donald Trump and Ted Cruz has moved beyond a skirmish between the two candidates. It now has drafted one of the greatest cities in the world.
At his rallies, Trump has recently started playing Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” — a song actually about the tragic tale of a Vietnam veteran — in an effort to taunt Cruz for having been born in Canada. It’s all part of Trump’s latest efforts to cast doubt on his rival’s constitutional eligibility to even run in the first place.
In an interview with a conservative talk radio host on Tuesday, Cruz cracked back: “Well, look, I think he may shift in his new rallies to playing ‘New York New York.’ Because you know, Donald comes from New York, and he embodies New York values. And listen, The Donald seems to be a little bit rattled.”
The remark comes at the very beginning of the interview here, which was reposted in full on Cruz’s official campaign account on YouTube.
Cruz’s riposte — denigrating the morality of America’s largest city, while he seeks to lead the entire country — earned its own response. In an interview aired Thursday morning on Bloomberg Politics, Trump shot back — by invoking 9/11:
“When you want to knock New York, you’ve got to go through me. New York is an amazing place with amazing people,” Trump said. “We took a big hit with the World Trade Center—worst thing ever, worst attack ever in the United States, worse than Pearl Harbor because they attacked civilians, they attacked people having breakfast and frankly if you would’ve been there and if you would’ve lived through that like I did with New York people—the way they handled that attack was one of the most incredible things that anybody has ever seen.”
Oh man, we really hate to say this, but it’s true right now: Donald Trump is right.
Meanwhile, New York Republican congressman Peter King is getting in on the action, with this short and simple statement given to CNN, calling out Cruz’s vast hypocrisy: “Memo to Ted Cruz: New York Values are the heroes of 9/11; the cops who fight terror; and the people you ask for campaign donations. Go back under a rock.”
King’s reference to Cruz “asking for campaign donations” might’ve been a sly reference to the Texas senator’s latest headache: The undisclosed loan he took from Wall Street firm Goldman Sachs — where his wife Heidi is a managing director — during his 2012 Senate campaign.
Of course, Cruz has spoken in the past about the great impact that 9/11 had upon him, too: He stopped listening to rock music, and started listening entirely to country instead. Let’s see if he brings up that again in any further rebuttal.
Photo: Republican U.S. presidential candidate businessman Donald Trump and Senator Ted Cruz (R) speak during the Republican presidential debate in Las Vegas, Nevada, December 15, 2015. REUTERS/Mike Blake
