Earlier today, Donald Trump spoke with conservative Wisconsin radio host Charlie Sykes about his recent attacks on Ted Cruz’s wife, which Sykes told the GOP presidential frontrunner made him seem like “a 12-year-old bully” rather than a serious candidate.
Last week, Trump retweeted an unflattering photo of the Texas senator’s wife, Heidi, and threatened to “spill the beans” on her past.
Trump told Sykes he only targeted Heidi Cruz because of a racy ad put out by a Super PAC unaffiliated with Cruz’s campaign that featured a photo Trump’s wife, Melania, posing partially nude in GQ magazine.
“Ted Cruz knew totally about it,” he said.
After Sykes said Trump is acting like a “twelve-year-old bully on the playground, not somebody who wants the office held by Abraham Lincoln,” Trump responded that he simply “did a retweet.” “I’m sure she’s excellent, I just don’t know her,” he went on to say of Heidi Cruz.
Sykes then played part of an ad that features women reading insulting remarks that Trump has made about women.
Trump responded by saying that he said those things when he didn’t know he’d be running for office.
“If Megyn Kelly were a man, I would be saying the exact same things about Megyn Kelly, and the same things with Rosie O’Donnell,” he said. “I don’t think there should be a double standard if somebody’s a woman. I have been better to women than any of these candidates, frankly.” Of course, it is unlikely that Trump would have called a man a “fat pig” or joked about his menstrual cycle.
After deflecting questions about the more liberal stances he has held in the past, insisting that he only held them in order to make business deals, Trump continued to demand that Cruz apologize to him for the Super PAC ad he was not involved in creating.
“He owes me an apology because what he did was wrong,” he said. “And there are some people who say that his group bought the copyright to the picture from GQ magazine.” Trump frequently uses the “some people say” line to get out of making substantiated statements.
“We’re not on the playground, we’re running for president of the United States,” Sykes responded.
