Add Ted Cruz to the list of people who don’t think Donald Trump will ride his current polling lead to the Republican presidential nomination.
“Let me be very clear: I don’t believe Donald Trump is gonna be the nominee, I don’t believe he’s gonna be our president,” Cruz said Monday during a town hall in Iowa. “And I actually think the men and women in this room have something powerful to say about it.”
Cruz, who no doubt thinks he will be the nominee, continues to say nice things about Trump, however, saying the New York businessman has framed the central question of the 2016 election: “Who will stand up to Washington?”
The Texas senator is also one of the few candidates who has not been attacked by Trump, who took Cruz’s prediction in stride.
“Well, he’s gotta say that,” Trump told reporters Monday. “I will be leading in every poll, and leading by actually very wide margins. So I think I will be (the nominee).”
If Cruz is to prevail, he must pass Trump as well as other Republican opponents — including another first term senator, Marco Rubio of Florida, who has been the subject of Cruz attacks.
In an interview with Bloomberg Politics, Cruz assailed Rubio for backing the 2011 military action in Libya and supporting the arming of rebels in Syria. He accused Rubio of supporting the kinds of “military adventurism” that has made the United States less safe.
Cruz told Bloomberg he would employ a simple foreign policy test: “How does it keep America safe? If it’s keeping America safe, we should do it. If it’s making America more vulnerable, we shouldn’t do it.”
Rubio spokesman Alex Conant responded: “While Senator Cruz voted to gut U.S. intelligence programs and make Americans less safe, nobody has shown a better understanding of the threats we face in the 21st Century than Marco.”
Reporting on Cruz’s comments about Trump, CNN said:
The Texas senator has previously refused to criticize the real estate mogul, so perhaps Cruz is taking a “keep your friends close, and your enemies closer” approach.
Cruz’s comments come at a time when his candidacy is catching up to Trump in the polls in Iowa, the first-in-the-nation caucus state. In a Quinnipiac University poll released last Tuesday, Trump remained first in Iowa with 25%, but Cruz edged Ben Carson out for second with 23% support.
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