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Getty Cruz: I didn't attack Trump earlier to avoid becoming 'roadkill'

Ted Cruz didn’t attack Donald Trump early in the cycle because others who had “ended up as roadkill.”

In an interview with Wisconsin's Charlie Sykes of WTMJ, the Texas senator was pressed about his earlier fawning statements about Trump, including a tweet from December that said he wouldn’t engage with Trump because the billionaire businessman was “terrific.”

“What took you so long?” WTMJ asked, referring to Cruz's now full-throated attacks on Trump.

“It was a wonderfully diverse, talented, dynamic, young field. It had really incredible talent. If you look at a number of the candidates that took on Donald Trump early on, they ended up as roadkill,” Cruz said in the Wednesday interview, which was first reported by BuzzFeed News.

Cruz said the strategy all along was to first build up a strong core of support before directly taking on Donald. “And not be roadkill,” Cruz added. “I am very strongly committed on the anti-roadkill approach.”

He added, “And so our approach was quite simple, we needed to build our base first. We needed to get my positive message out, my record out, and build and assemble our team."

Cruz said at the beginning of the year he started “drawing sharp contrasts with Donald.” But Cruz said he still didn’t engage in insults unlike Trump.

But by Thursday, the gloves were off, as Cruz and Trump swung at each other over a spat about their wives.

It started when an anti-Trump super PAC used old photos from British GQ of Melania Trump in an ad designed to turn Utah's Mormon off the real estate mogul. Trump blamed Cruz, and in a tweet, vaguely threatened to “spill the beans” about Cruz's wife, Thursday.

On Thursday afternoon, Cruz theatrically called Trump "a sniveling coward."

“Leave Heidi the hell alone,” he told television cameras during a campaign stop in Wisconsin, forcefully thrusting a finger at an imaginary Trump.