"Ted Cruz's campaign is over," and it ended after Donald Trump beat him among evangelicals in South Carolina on Saturday, MSNBC's Joe Scarborough declared Tuesday morning.
"It ended in South Carolina when Donald Trump beat Ted Cruz among evangelicals after coming out in support of Planned Parenthood," the former lawmaker said on his
"Morning Joe" talk show.
"Ted Cruz's campaign is over. Mark it down. He is not going to win the nomination. He may win Texas. It's over."
It wasn't just the South Carolina race that ended the Texas senator's campaign for the GOP presidential nomination, said Scarborough, but other incidents as well, including his decision on Monday to
fire national spokesman Rick Tyler, who made a social media post of a video claiming that Florida Sen. Marco Rubio suggested to a Cruz staffer who was reading the Bible there "aren't many answers in it."
"What happened yesterday was an ugly, terrible exclamation point to the end of Ted Cruz's campaign," said Scarborough. "I'm not being hateful any more than I was sucking up to Donald Trump when I said before anybody else that the guy was going to be a player here."
Further, said Scarborough, he does not believe Florida Sen. Marco Rubio can stop Trump, either.
"They're not going to stop Trump for a simple reason, one of the reasons why most of the media has missed this thing for the past six or seven months, part of his appeal is people think he's fearless and he has two people now left to combat him, Cruz and Rubio, who are both filled with fear," he said.
If Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich can be encouraged to leave the race so that Rubio could face Trump one-on-one, there could be a chance of bringing down the New York real estate mogul, he continued, "but unless you do and it's Marco Rubio versus Donald Trump, it's game over by Super Tuesday."