Donald Trump insisted Tuesday as Indiana voters head to the polls that his supporters "have been watching" rival Ted Cruz lying, and the Texas Republican looked one of those voters in the eye and lied even more during a face-to-face, seven-minute confrontation Monday.
"That's why we call him lyin' Ted," the GOP front-runner told Fox News'
"Fox & Friends" program. "The people are smart people. And they haven't been taken properly care of by the government."
Monday afternoon,
Cruz faced off against a handful of protesters in Marion, Indiana, who were holding Trump signs and shouting "Lyin' Ted" at him, engaging one of the men in a debate, reports
CNN.
The senator kept his voice measured during a seven-minute conversation as the man interjected questions like "are you a Canadian" and telling Cruz that he's "mathematically eliminated" from the GOP nomination.
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During the argument, Cruz told the man that he was being played "as a chump" by Trump, and that the front-runner had told The New York Times that he was never going to build a wall on the Mexican border.
Trump said Tuesday that the wall comment was false, and Cruz "makes stuff up. It just comes out of his mouth."
Meanwhile, Trump said the Cruz camp is spending millions of dollars on ads "that are a lie," and noted that when that happened in Florida, he won in a landslide.
"One of the groups that did the ad, they asked me for $1 million I said, no thank you," said Trump. "They went out and did negative ads on me. That's called Club for Growth. They're a bunch of extortionists."
Trump also on Tuesday attacked Cruz's minister father Rafael Cruz, who commented last week to a crowd of evangelicals that he wanted to "implore" that Christians "vote according to the word of God" and pick his son.
"I think it's a disgrace that he's allowed to do it," Trump said Tuesday. "I think it's a disgrace that he's allowed to say it. You look at Jerry Falwell Jr., look at so many of the ministers that are backing me and they're backing me more so than Cruz, and I'm winning the evangelical vote."
Also, said Trump, "there's a whole thing, and his father was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald's being shot. I mean, the whole thing is ridiculous. What is this, right prior to his being shot, and nobody brings it up. They don't even talk about that. That was reported and nobody talks about it. But I think it's horrible."
Those comments were made in reference to a National Enquirer article claiming that the elder Cruz was the unidentified man shown next to John Fitzgerald Kennedy's assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, while the killer was passing out pro-Castro pamphlets in New Orleans in 1963.
Cruz's campaign has pushed back against the story, published in the May 2, edition, telling
The Miami Herald that it was "another garbage story in a tabloid full of garbage. The story is false; that is not Rafael in the picture."
But meanwhile, Trump said he was not surprised to see a new Rasmussen poll showing himself and Hillary Clinton as their parties' nominees, and he promised that he'll defeat Clinton come fall.
He further railed against Clinton's statements about her husband, former Bill Clinton, having an active role in her White House.
"If you'll remember all of the scandal that they had, all of the problems with not only Monica [Lewinsky] that was one, but Whitewater and all of the things that went wrong," said Trump.
Further, said Trump, the former president signed the North American Free Trade Agreement [NAFTA].
"NAFTA has drained our country of jobs, it's drained us of manufacturing," said the front-runner.