Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, increasingly facing pressure from GOP rival Ted Cruz, raised questions Tuesday about the Texas senator’s Canadian birth and whether it would hurt the party’s chances if he were its nominee.
“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?’ That’d be a big problem,” Trump said in an interview with The Washington Post.
“It’d be a very precarious one for Republicans,” Trump said. “The courts may take a long time to make a decision. You don’t want to be running and have that kind of thing over your head.”
Cruz, who has largely avoided directly criticizing Trump, responded with a humorous but pointed tweet. It featured a link from the television show “Happy Days” showing the character Fonzie water-skiing over a shark. That episode gave rise to the term “jumping the shark” to describe going comically overboard.
The issue Trump raised is one that most legal experts consider settled.
The Constitution requires presidents to be “natural-born citizens.” The children of American citizens who are born abroad are automatically granted citizenship. Cruz was born in Canada, but his mother was an American citizen.
Trump has long questioned President Barack Obama’s citizenship and Hawaiian birthplace, even after the president released his long-form birth certificate in 2011.
Trump is the front-runner in national GOP presidential polls, but has slipped behind Cruz in Iowa, the state that holds the first nominating contest in the nation on Feb. 1. He has grown increasingly aggressive in remarks against Cruz in recent weeks, questioning his temperament and his evangelical faith.
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