As Super Tuesday Looms, Cruz And Rubio Scramble To Catch Trump
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork/AP) -- Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio continue to take swipes at Donald Trump ahead of the Super Tuesday presidential primaries.
Major wins on Super Tuesday could help the Republican front-runner expand his delegate lead in an increasingly caustic nomination fight.
From Rubio mocking "Hair Force One'' to Cruz dismissing Trump's wealth as a result of "picking the right Daddy'' and suggesting the billionaire has business ties to the Mafia, the two first-term senators have unleashed a personal and policy-based barrage.
Rubio and Cruz took to the Sunday talk show circuit to warn that nominating Trump would be catastrophic for the party in November and beyond.
"We're about to lose the conservative movement to someone who's not a conservative and (lose) the party of Lincoln and Reagan to a con artist,'' Rubio said Sunday on Fox News.
Trump, in turn, has mocked the Republican establishment and his flailing rivals ahead of a glut of Tuesday primaries that offer up almost a quarter of the GOP's total delegate count.
"It's amazing what's going on,'' he told NBC, calling his campaign a "movement.''
Trump went on to explain his own brand of popularism on CNN.
"I'm representing a lot of anger out there,'' he said. "We're not angry people, but we're angry at the way this country's being run (and) angry at the way the Republican Party is being run.''
Trump also rejected calls from calls from Rubio and Cruz to release his tax returns, saying he can't share returns that are under IRS audit.
The senators on Saturday released summary pages of several years' worth of their personal returns. Trump said he's already shared his personal financial details in separate disclosure forms.
"You can't tell much from tax returns'' anyway, Trump said.
Cruz warned conservatives that the "Trump train'' could become "unstoppable'' if he reigns in big victories on Tuesday. Cruz cast Trump as a carbon copy of Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton and suggested that not even Trump "knows what he would do'' as president.
Rubio added on CBS that Trump "is trying to pull off the biggest scam in American political history.''
And while Cruz has said he will support whoever the Republican nominee is, Rubio has been sidestepping the question lately, insisting that Trump will not win the nomination.
The line-up Tuesday includes several Southern states that form the core of Cruz's desired path to the nomination, but he finds himself trailing Trump everywhere but his home state of Texas. Rubio does not lead anywhere, leaving the two senators mostly to scramble for second-place finishes and as many delegates as possible.
"I've been an underdog my whole life both in life and in politics and we're going to do well. We're going to pick up a lot of delegates,'' Rubio said on CBS. "We're going to be in as many states as it takes to ensure that I'm the nominee.''
On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton received another burst of momentum Saturday after her landslide victory in South Carolina.
Exit polls showed 84 percent of black voters went with Clinton over rival Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, and nearly 50 percent of women.
Clinton picked up most of South Carolina's 53 delegates, winning 39 to Sanders' 14.
"We got decimated, that's what happened,'' Sanders said on ABC, though he promised to continue his campaign against what he describes as a political and economic oligarchy.
Sanders, expecting defeat on Saturday, left the state before voting finished and turned his attention to states outside the South that vote in next Tuesday's contests.
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