The Republican presidential race turned yet more toxic last night, with Donald Trump and Ted Cruz exchanging personal insults online as they waited to learn the results of votes in Arizona and Utah. On a day when the billionaire front-runner and his closest rival had already traded low blows over the terror attacks in Brussels, their vitriolic Twitter exchange provided a bitter backdrop for the primary contests in the West.
Mr Trump racked up 58 more delegates from Arizona’s winner-takes-all race but, in neighbouring Utah, the Cruz campaign was hoping to secure the 50 per cent of the vote necessary to claim all 40 of the state’s delegates.
Ahead of the Utah vote, the anti-Trump super PAC Make America Awesome had released a series of Facebook advertisements targeting Mormons, who make up 60 per cent of the Beehive State’s population. The ads featured Mr Trump’s wife, Melania – a former model – posing naked for a GQ magazine cover from 2000, with the caption: “Meet Melania Trump, your next first lady. Or you could support Ted Cruz on Tuesday.”
Responding to the attack, Mr Trump threatened Mr Cruz’s wife Heidi in a cryptic tweet. “Be careful, Lyin’ Ted,” he warned, “or I will spill the beans on your wife!” Mr Cruz replied by pointing out that the ad had not come from his campaign. Calling Mr Trump’s threat “classless”, he tweeted: “Donald, if you try to attack Heidi, you’re more of a coward than I thought.”
It remained unclear exactly what “beans” Mr Trump could “spill” regarding Mrs Cruz, Heidi, a senior investment manager at Goldman Sachs, who is on a leave of absence from the firm for the duration of her husband’s White House campaign.
The two men had also clashed earlier in the day, over their differing responses to the attacks in Brussels. On Monday, Mr Trump had outlined a broadly isolationist foreign policy platform, which included scaling back US involvement in Nato. Shortly after the attacks, Mr Cruz seized on those remarks to criticise the frontrunner.
“It is striking that the day after Donald Trump called for weakening Nato, withdrawing from Nato, we see Brussels, where NATO is headquartered, the subject of a radical Islamic terror attack,” Mr Cruz said at a press conference, adding: “Donald Trump is wrong that America should withdraw from the world and abandon our allies.”
Mr Cruz also called for a moratorium on refugees coming to the US from countries with “a significant al-Qaeda or Isis presence” and said the US needed to “empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim neighbourhoods before they become radicalised.”
Mr Trump, as if attempting to out-tough the Texas Senator, re-iterated his plan to temporarily ban all Muslims from entering the US. As President, he told ABC News, he would reintroduce waterboarding, adding: “I would try to expand the laws to go beyond waterboarding.”
The rancour between the Republicans is a preview of what could be an uncommonly nasty general election – especially if, as now seems probable, Mr Trump becomes the party’s nominee. The Donald has demonstrated little compunction about making personal attacks on his likely Democrat rival, Hillary Clinton, who last night won her own party’s primary in Arizona.
Asked on CNN earlier to respond to Mr Trump’s claims that she lacked the “stamina” and “strength” required of a president, the former Secretary of State declined. “I don’t want to respond to his constant stream of insults,” she said. “I find it really, at this point, absurd.”
