WASHINGTON — The truce between Donald Trump and Ted Cruz is over, with the Texas senator slapping the most offensive label he could think of on his GOP rival: New Yorker.
With Cruz holding a narrow three-point lead over Trump in a new Des Moines Register poll in Iowa, the former allies started unloading on each other Tuesday night and into Wednesday with increasingly disparaging attacks.
Cruz told the Howie Carr radio show that Trump should stop playing “Born in the USA” at his rallies — a song that’s an obvious dig at the Canadian-born Texas senator.
“I think he may shift in his new rallies to playing ‘New York, New York’ because Donald comes from New York and he embodies New York values,” Cruz said on the show Tuesday.
The comment wasn’t intended as a compliment.
Cruz supporters in Iowa have been testing possible attack lines against Trump in a telephone poll — and one of them brands the GOP presidential front-runner as a New York liberal.
Kedron Bardwell, a political-science professor at Simpson College, said he received one of the calls and was told by an interviewer that Trump is a “New York liberal pretending to have conservative values.”
The interviewer added, “He’s from the Upper East Side . . . That is very different from Iowa,” according to Bardwell.
Former Iowa Republican Party chair Matt Strawn said he doubted the attack would work, since Iowans have been watching Trump from New York on TV for decades.
Trump returned fire Wednesday, slamming Cruz for his comments, insisting he was proud to be a New Yorker.
“You know, when the World Trade Center got hit, we rebuilt that World Trade Center and we got through and very few places in this world could have gotten through what we went through,” Trump told the Carr radio show. “I mean, I was so proud of New York.”
Cruz’s mother is a Delaware native, and despite being born in another country, he insists he is a “natural-born citizen” of the United States who meets constitutional requirements to qualify as eligible for the presidency.
Meanwhile, The New York Times reported that Cruz took a loan of more than $1 million from Goldman Sachs and Citibank to finance his 2012 Senate campaign without disclosing it in campaign-finance reports.
Cruz insisted in the past that he and his wife decided to “liquidate our entire net worth” to finance the run. A spokesperson for Cruz said the failure to report the loan was “inadvertent.”
Additional reporting by Joe Tacopino