Trump Questions Cruz’ Legal Ability to Run for President

Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump has questioned whether rival candidate Ted Cruz is eligible to become his party’s nominee because he was born in Canada. But the fact he isn’t backing down suggests both that he’s feeling heat from Cruz’s ascent in the polls, and that he sees a vulnerability to exploit. The moment, known as “jumping the shark”, has come to refer to the use of a gimmick to halt the decline of a television show or other effort.

He’s lobbed a series of insinuations Cruz’s way recently.

Some analysts are predicting that Mr Cruz will win because of how the voting process is structured in Iowa. While the overlap of a “nationals and citizens of the United States at birth”, as written in the legal code, and the Constitution’s “natural-born citizen” hasn’t been tested before, most experts agree that Cruz would meet the standard. The U.S. Constitution requires that presidents be “natural born citizens”, which Cruz is alleged to not be, since he was born in Canada. The children of American citizens who are born overseas are automatically granted citizenship.

But that didn’t stop Trump from raising the issue Tuesday.

“Republicans are going to have to ask themselves the question: ‘Do we want a candidate who could be tied up in court for two years?'” Trump said in reference to Cruz’s Canadian birth. “It’d be a very precarious one for Republicans because he’d be running and the courts may take a long time to make decision”. So how do you run? Obama is an American citizen; his father was Kenyan, his mother American.

John McCain faced the same question, as did Barry Goldwater, George Romney, and Chester A. Arthur. Since then, he’s consistently called Cruz’s foreign birth “a problem”, but has stated as recently as a few months ago that the issue “was checked out by every attorney and every which way and I understand Ted is in fine shape”.

The possibility that Cruz may not be eligible for the White House is something that Trump himself even dismissed last fall.

“Everybody’s talking about it now that he’s doing better, and I think that they are looking at it”, Trump said.

“My wife, who was sitting next to me, said, ‘Oh, look”.

When Cruz came out with his immigration platform in November, his first listed priority was to secure the border by building “a wall that works” along the U.S.-Mexico border.

If you happen to be friends with Donald Trump, by the way, please ask him to take the quiz. “But he didn’t give me credit”.

“But it’s amusing – last week or so, I actually got a bill from Trump National Golf Club”, he told Rhapsody.