After spending the better part of two weeks questioning his Republican presidential rival Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX)’s eligibility to run for President, Donald Trump denied Wednesday that he “drummed up” doubts about Cruz’s status as a “natural-born citizen.”
In a phone interview on MSNBC’s “Live With Thomas Roberts,” Trump said the controversy “wasn’t drummed up by me. It was drummed up by The Washington Post. There are many lawyers that say he can’t run for president.”
That characterization isn’t quite accurate. Trump, who questioned the authenticity of President Barack Obama’s birth certificate as a vocal “birther” during the run-up to the 2012 election, raised concerns about Cruz’s eligibility before he even entered the 2016 race. He floated the idea that Cruz’s Canadian birth could cause him trouble in the election again in a Jan. 6 interview with the Post, in which he made the vague claim that “people are bringing it up.” He has been repeating these allegations on a near-daily basis ever since.
While the issue was all but absent from the headlines until that Jan. 6 interview, it has provoked a constant stream of chatter over the last few weeks, with everyone from White House spokesman Josh Earnest to Cruz himself weighing in.
On Jan. 11, Harvard constitutional law professor Lawrence Tribe told The Guardian that the issue of Cruz’s eligibility was “murky and unsettled,” given the lack of a consistent legal definition of the Constitutional requirement that the U.S. president be a “natural born citizen.”
Constitutional law professor Mary Brigid McManamon followed up with a Tuesday Washington Post op-ed in which she stated her unequivocal opinion that Cruz did not qualify as a natural born citizen and was therefore ineligible to hold the office of commander-in-chief.
Cruz has repeatedly argued that the issue is “settled law” and that his staff has confirmed that he can run.
In Trump’s telling, these questions were already percolating before he brought the issue to the front of the national political conversation.
“Now, when you’re a citizen of Canada and you were born in Canada, there’s a real question,” he said in Tuesday’s MSNBC interview. “A lot of people say you have to be born of the land, meaning on the land. And I’ve read numerous articles—and not only professor Lawrence tribe of Harvard, you can go to others. There was a big article the other day in The Washington Post from a different group of lawyers saying the same thing.”
Trump also told MSNBC’s Roberts that Democrats would “bring a lawsuit” against Cruz over the issue if he ended up becoming the Republican nominee. Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) has already suggested he would do so.
