Donald Trump isn't letting go of his Ted Cruz birtherism. And why should he? Fomenting fear of sneaky, underhanded foreigners is his thing.
Donald J. Trump sharply escalated his rhetoric about Senator Ted Cruz’s eligibility to be president on Saturday, suggesting that because he was born in Canada there were unanswered questions about whether he met the constitutional requirement to be a "natural-born citizen."
“You can’t have a person who’s running for office, even though Ted is very glib and he goes out and says ‘Well, I’m a natural-born citizen,’ but the point is you’re not,” Mr. Trump said while campaigning in Clear Lake, Iowa.
Most people, of course, consider Ted Cruz's birth to an American mother—thus making him an American citizen at birth—to be conclusive. But the Republican Party of the last near-decade has hosted a cottage industry of people suspicious of the idea that merely being born to an American mother counts as being "American" enough to be president, and Donald Trump has long considered himself to be that movement's undeclared king and/or chief justice and/or snack bar host. If these people can get themselves worked up over a president being born in the suspicious-sounding foreign locale of Hawaii, you can rest assured they won't take Calgary lying down. (Or maybe they will. Honestly, trying to predict what will or won't become the next grand conservative conspiracy theory is a fool's errand. By this time next week they could be insisting that Marco Rubio is secretly half-panda.)
What's perhaps more interesting is the lengths Ted Cruz's fellow Republicans are going to to not back Ted Cruz up on this one. Keep in mind that when past presidential contender John McCain's detractors were objecting to his birth on an American military base in Panama, the Senate was right quick to settle the issue in their fellow senator's favor. This time, however, Mitch McConnell says the Senate won't be getting involved in the issue. Likewise, Republican National Committee head Reince Priebus has pointedly declined to weigh in, even though vouching for the inherent American-ness of one of his candidates seems like literally the least his party could do.
So it seems that yes, Sen. Ted Cruz's fellow Republicans and senators really do hate him that much. No doubt if the Republican base makes Cruz the nominee, they'll all suddenly be piping up to explain how none of this was ever an issue. But in the meantime they're more than happy to hang Cruz out to dry—at least for a while.