The Trump Cruz rivalry
by digby
I wrote about the latest for Salon this morning:
Another weekend, another series of Donald Trump interviews in which he runs circles around anchors who are simply flummoxed by the candidate, unable to get him to respond to questions like a normal person. Not that you can blame them. He’s one slippery guy. And it has to be tough to keep your concentration when trying to talk to someone who is wearing such an odd color of make-up.
So, for the most part, Trump was Trump and they were stumped. But one question did elicit some real news. When asked about Ted Cruz’s comments to some donors last week in which he called Trump’s qualifications to be Commander in Chief into question, for the first time Trump went on the attack against his little buddy:
“You look like the way he’s dealt with the Senate, where he goes in there like — frankly like a little bit of a maniac. You’re never going to get things done that way. You can’t walk into the Senate and scream and call people liars and not be able to cajole and get along with people. He’ll never be able to get anything done, and that’s the problem with Ted.”
It’s unnecessary at this point to even point out how ridiculous that sounds coming from Donald Trump, the man who has insulted literally millions of his fellow Americans and most of the world, as well as the entire Republican leadership. But that’s him. He’s the only presidential candidate in history who actually believes he is the Green Lantern, and will, therefore, be able to rule not by fiat, but by the sheer force of his supernatural abilities to “get things done.” All of this comes on the heels of polling that show a big Cruz surge, not just in Iowa, where he’s overtaken Trump by a “yuuuge” margin but nationally as well. Cruz is no longer one of the fringe guys. He’s for real.
Some of us predicted this a while back — he is a smart politician and he’s been positioning himself to take the anti-establishment vote from one or both of the early frontrunners from the beginning. Carson lost altitude when it became obvious that his experience as a neurosurgeon did not prepare him for the rough and tumble world of presidential politics and Cruz was there to catch his followers as they fell. Now he and The Donald are fighting it out for the 50 percent of the party that thinks the biggest problem for the GOP is that it just isn’t crazy enough.
So Cruz tweeted a rather sweet and gentle response to Trump’s taunts, indicating that he is not going to take the bait, but it’s pretty clear that Trump is going to go into this week’s debate loaded for bear. He does not like being in second place.
Meanwhile, the putative “establishment frontrunner,” Marco Rubio, whose polling remains mired in the teens at best, made an appearance on “Meet The Press” and demonstrated why that is. When asked about Trump’s proposal to ban Muslims from entering the country, instead of explaining that it’s both immoral and counterproductive, he chose to emulate a bucket of lukewarm water and said:
“Obviously I don’t agree with everything he says … but we can’t ignore that’s touched on some issues that people are concerned about.”
If he’s trying to make Jeb Bush look tough by comparison, that’s a good way to do it.
There’s more. People are really beginning to wonder if Rubio’s got the fire in the belly. He’s hardly working and it shows. So maybe we really do end up with Trump vs Cruz down the stretch. Good God.
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