Donald Trump on Friday said that he was not questioning Ted Cruz's Christianity, like Pope Francis did his own on Thursday, when he questioned the Texas senator's honesty in several statements.
"I'm not questioning his faith," Trump told
NBC's "Today" show reporters Savannah Guthrie and Willie Geist. "I did say that Ted Cruz holds up the Bible and then lies. He's been caught on almost all occasions. He did voter violation forms, which is a fraud. He did so many things so bad. I've never seen anything like it."
Earlier this week, Trump tweeted and
posted a statement to his website about the issue, saying online that it is "hard to believe a person who proclaims to be a Christian could be so dishonest and lie so much," after calling Cruz a "totally unstable individual" and the "single biggest liar I've ever come across."
And on Friday, Trump repeated those comments, saying that "Ted Cruz lies. Everybody knows he lies. It's disgraceful and, yet, he says he's an evangelical Christian . . . I'm just saying, he says it."
Also on the show's phone interview, Trump argued with Guthrie about his statements concerning the war in Iraq, and when she said that voters in South Carolina are seizing on the issue, he responded, "I think you're seizing on it; I don't think the voters are seizing on it."
"I don't know if he [former President George W. Bush] lied or not," Trump told her. "He could have. Maybe he did and maybe he didn't. I guess you'd have to ask him. Whatever, the decision to go into the Middle East, Iraq, was one of the worst decisions in the history of our country."
He further shot down a question about a 2002 interview with talk show host Howard Stern, who he told "I guess so" when asked if the United States should go to war with Iraq.
"That was long before the war started," he said. "By the time the war started — and you have documentation of this — by the time the war started, I was against it. Don't forget, I wasn't a politician. Nobody cared about my opinion. That was just a question asked of me. I was a civilian. I was an entrepreneur."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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