Trump went even further, raising the possibility, to CNN’s Chris Cuomo, that he was being audited because he was a “strong Christian.”)
.. Cruz, with leading questions and prosecutorial zeal, forced Trump to acknowledge that he does not, indeed, want people to die “on the sidewalks and the streets.” Cruz made it clear that he considered this a damning admission.
.. Although he likes to portray himself as a successful entrepreneur who created a vastly profitable business, many people in the business world have long regarded him as a self-promoting huckster who emblazons his name on properties that don’t belong to him and habitually overstates his net worth.
.. During the debate, he claimed that tax returns don’t give any indication of a person’s wealth, which is nonsense. If Trump’s various businesses are worth as much as he claims they are, they must generate a great deal of revenue and income, at least some of which would be reflected on his tax returns.
.. Back in the nineteen-seventies, Johnston points out, New York City Mayor Abe Beame gave Trump a four-hundred-million-dollar tax abatement to facilitate his first big real-estate deal, the conversion of a hotel next to Grand Central Terminal. During the nineteen-eighties, when the city refused to give Trump seven hundred million dollars in tax breaks for his controversial Riverside South development, he had a bitter dispute with Mayor Ed Koch.
Donald Trump, Crony Capitalist
The Trump phenomenon caught everybody by surprise. Yet it is a manifestation of a fundamental contradiction long present in the Republican Party: Despite fierce anti-big-business sentiment among many Republican voters, no Republican candidate has emerged to champion them.
The Devil in Ted Cruz
At a town hall in South Carolina that CNN televised, he answered a question about his miserable relations with fellow lawmakers in Washington by assuring voters that “it’s not that I speak with a lack of civility or respect.”
“The Bible talks about if someone treats you unkindly, repay them with kindness,” he added. “That has been the standard I’ve tried to follow. That’s how I’ve approached it in the Senate. So I have not attacked or insulted my colleagues in the Senate, Democrat or Republican.”
Is he suffering from delusions? Amnesia? On the Senate floor he called Mitch McConnell, the Republican majority leader, a liar. He also likened Senate Republicans who recognized the impossibility of defunding Obamacare to Nazi appeasers.
Ted Cruz Fires Top Aide for Spreading Misinformation on Marco Rubio
Mr. Cruz went on to call Mr. Tyler a “good man,” but that his sharing of the story was “a grave error in judgment.”
.. The firing represents a public admission of what Mr. Rubio and his aides have angrily claimed for weeks: that the Cruz campaign is undertaking unfair and deceitful tactics to undermine rivals, such as a using manipulated photograph, doctored by Cruz aides, that suggested Mr. Rubio had shaken hands with President Obama in front of the Capitol in Washington.