Trump, Cruz trade jabs on social media

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump gives a thumbs-up during a campaign stop, Saturday, Jan. 16, 2016, in Portsmouth, N.H.

Since Cruz’s best moments came out early in the evening, with Trump’s in the middle, and Sen. The Senate forms do not state explicitly that the money was used on his campaign.

On Saturday morning, Trump, the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, used Twitter to fire a fierce broadside at the Texas senator, whom he called a “natural born Canadian“, “owned” by the big banks and “special interests that control him“.

Once he raised the issue at the tea party event, Trump didn’t back down amid booing. “Trump is number one, and Cruz is second, in SC values”.

“Say whatever you want”, Trump said in response to the boos.

For Trump, the offensive continued his pattern of aggressiveness toward whichever of his rivals he says have attacked him first, from Jeb Bush and Rand Paul to former candidates like Rick Perry and Lindsey Graham.

Yet Trump could prove the exception.

The famously aggressive NY media have gone full bore against Cruz.

But Cruz’s response has been to double-down: Saturday he released a video of Trump saying in 1999 that “Hey, I lived in New York City and Manhattan all my life so my views are a little bit different than if I lived in Iowa, perhaps, but [gays openly serving in the military] is not something that would disturb me”. And now he is tying the bank loan storyline to Cruz’s recent critique that Trump represents “New York values”, an all-encompassing insult understood by residents in more rural, conservative states like Iowa and SC.

But in rural Iowa he often recites Scripture, telling stories about his daughters’ prayers and exhorting voters to pray for him and the country at least one minute a day before February 1 caucus.

The race has had a lot of talk about lanes: Outsider, Evangelical, Libertarian, Tea Party, Establishment, etc. According to this conventional wisdom, Trump has dominated the role of outsider, Cruz has consolidated the tea party and much of the libertarian and evangelical vote, and there’s a close fight between Rubio, Kasich, Bush, and Christie for the establishment lane.

And his aides, once loathe to even utter anything that could be construed as negative about the GOP front-runner, gleefully shared their favorite parts of Trump’s history of political donations, an effort to tie him to New York’s foremost liberal Democrats, including Hillary Clinton.