Trump accuses Cruz of being 'worse than Hillary'

Donald Trump accused rival Ted Cruz of being “worse than Hillary,” telling an Iowa crowd that the Texas senator has been misleading the public about his Canadian birth and big loans he received from Wall Street.

“He said with him being a Canadian citizen, ‘Oh, I didn’t know that.’ How did he not know that?” Trump questioned. “Then he said with the loans, ‘Oh, I didn’t know that.’ Smart guy. He doesn’t know that? Yeah, that’s worse than Hillary, when you think about it.”


Trump, speaking at a rally in Norwalk, Iowa, said Cruz purposely opted not to disclose bank loans from Goldman Sachs and Citibank. The billionaire businessman contrasted the nearly 100 pages of financial files he had to disclose with Cruz’s two bank loans — “that we know of,” he added.

“The problem is he didn’t do it purposely because what he wanted to do is say, ‘I will protect you from Goldman Sachs. I will protect you from Citibank, and I will protect you from the banks because I’m Robin Hood, and I’m this wonderful senatorand I’m going to protect you from these banks,’” Trump said. “And then he’s borrowing from the banks. And, by the way, he’s got personal guarantees and he’s got low-interest loans. He’s got low-interest loans. They’re low interest, and now he’s going to go after Goldman Sachs? Doesn’t work that way. Goldman Sachs owns him. Remember that, folks. They own him.”

The Manhattan mogul argued that Cruz’s signature on the financial disclosure form in which he failed to list two major loans during his 2012 Senate campaign was “very strong” and urged Iowa voters to keep that in mind next month. The New York Times first reported on the letter Cruz sent to federal officials last Thursdayacknowledging that he had not properly accounted for the source of the two loans.

“Very strong, that signature on the bottom,” he said. “You sign that, you got problems if you make mistakes. He didn’t put down two big banks loaning him money because he didn’t want you to see that. That’s a problem, OK? That’s a problem. And I think when you go to caucusyou should think about that problem, OK? You should think about it.”

Trump in recent weeks has raised the birther issue with respect to Cruz, who was born in Calgary, Canada, to an American-born mother. Though Cruz renounced his Canadian citizenship in 2014, Trump called it “big stuff.”

“He was actually a Canadian citizen — if you think about this, he was a Canadian citizen while he was a United States senator,” Trump said. “He was a joint citizen of the United States and Canada, but how do you do that? And he said he didn’t know about it, which is interesting. He didn’t know about it.”

Trump and his campaign have maintained that Democrats would sue to challenge Cruz’s eligibility if he were to win the Republican nomination. Hillary Clinton has a different problem with the controversy surrounding her personal email server while serving as secretary of state, Trump said, but Cruz has “got a problem of uncertainty. You just don’t know. I mean, you just don’t know.”

“So let’s see what happens with Cruz,” he continued. “But it’s very hard to let somebody go through a whole, long process, and at the end of the process — should he win — they’re going to be suing him, just like he’s already being sued.”

Donald Trump: Ted Cruz is 'owned by Goldman Sachs'

Trump has been intensifying his attacks on Cruz, who has been nipping at the businessman's heels in Iowa, ahead of the Feb. 1 caucuses. Trump scored a heaping of media attention on Tuesday when he revealed that Sarah Palin was endorsing him and would be hitting the campaign trail with him. Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad also publicly opposed Cruz on Tuesday, labeling him “the biggest opponent of renewable fuels.”

“Yesterday was a W,” Trump said, calling Tuesday a win for his campaign. “You had that statement; you had Sarah Palin. That was a good day for Trump.”

Palin, however, did not join Trump at his first rally of the day, though she's expected to share the stage with him later in the day in Oklahoma.

Trump pushed the crowd to rally behind his campaign and vote Feb. 1. It’s very important, he stressed. Trump and Cruz are within 1 percentage point of each other in RealClearPolitics’ latest average of Iowa polls.

“If we, and really, they say it — if we win Iowa, we’re going to run the table,” Trump said. “We may not lose a state.”