Trench warfare

Trump and Cruz shift to trench warfare

The two Republican candidates will be scrapping for delegates after splitting Tuesday’s contests.

By Shane Goldmacher

The Republican primary shifted to a new phase — trench warfare — as Donald Trump and Ted Cruz each won one state in Tuesday’s contests and dug in for an increasingly ugly battle that will now likely drag through the final primary in California, if not beyond.

Trump won Arizona and its 58 delegates. Cruz scored a victory in Utah and appeared poised to win all of its 40 delegates by winning more than 50 percent of the vote there. But the dueling results only underscored how far the GOP is from unifying behind Trump, who extended his delegate lead and cemented his frontrunner status.

Trump, who has won 19 of the 29 states that have been decided, has loudly called on GOP leaders to coalesce behind him. “They should embrace this movement,” Trump said as he campaigned in the nation’s capital earlier this week.

He again pushed that message after racking up the Arizona delegates, tweeting, “Hopefully the Republican Party can come together and have a big WIN in November, paving the way for many great Supreme Court Justices!”

But Cruz, John Kasich (who lost badly in both states Tuesday), and the anti-Trump forces within the GOP continue their push to deny Trump the 1,237 delegates he needs to secure the nomination and force a historic contested convention this summer in Cleveland.

“All of our projections had Trump winning AZ. We didn't play there. His road to 1,237 just as rocky,” Katie Packer, founder of the anti-Trump group Our Priorities PAC, tweeted shortly after Trump’s Arizona win.

Trump has at least 739 delegates, nearly 60 percent of the total he needs. Cruz lags far behind, while Kasich has already been mathematically eliminated from winning the nomination outright.

Attention will now turn to Wisconsin, the only state to vote in the next 27 days, on April 5. Cruz will campaign there for three straight days, starting Wednesday, as his campaign prepares to open yet another “Camp Cruz,” a dormitory for supporters willing to come knock doors on his behalf.

The backdrop for Tuesday’s elections was new terror attacks in Europe that killed at least 31 in Brussels and reignited national security fears. Cruz and Trump spent much of the day trying to outdo one another in terms of cracking down on radical Islamic terrorists.

Trump, who has positioned himself as a strongman who can obliterate the Islamic State and strictly control immigration, bluntly called for the return of torture as an America policy. Cruz refused to be upstaged, and called for heightened policing of Muslim communities in the United States.

Hillary Clinton, the Democratic frontrunner, condemned them both in her own victory speech Tuesday night after beating Bernie Sanders in Arizona by a huge margin. “We see people who are running for president of the United States who are literally inciting bigotry and violence,” she said. After losing Arizona, Sanders went on to win big in both Idaho and Utah on Tuesday.

In a sign of just how nasty the tone of the Republican race has gotten, Trump tweeted, then deleted, and then tweeted again a threat about Cruz’s wife just as the polls closed Tuesday night.

"Lyin' Ted Cruz just used a picture of Melania from a G.Q. shoot in his ad. Be careful, Lyin' Ted, or I will spill the beans on your wife!"

The message is an apparent reference to an anti-Trump group, not affiliated with Cruz's campaign, that has been running Facebook ads featuring a photo of Trump's wife posing nude for British GQ in 2000.

Cruz fired back, tweeting, “Pic of your wife not from us. Donald, if you try to attack Heidi, you're more of a coward than I thought. #classless.”

Cruz isn’t just battling with Trump. He is pushing for Kasich to get out of the race, telling Bill O’Reilly on Fox News on Tuesday night that Kasich “can only be a spoiler.”

“He went 0-for-27, he won his home state and then he's going to proceed to lose this series of states,” Cruz said, adding, “At this point what he's doing doesn't make any sense unless he's auditioning to be Trump's vice president.”

The Club for Growth, which has underwritten millions of dollars of anti-Trump ads, announced it had formally endorsed Cruz on Wednesday, part of the push to consolidate the anti-Trump movement behind Cruz.

Kasich’s campaign, however, is dug in. His chief strategist John Weaver issued a memo Tuesday calling Kasich “the key” to stopping Trump and arguing both Cruz and Trump “would lose to Hillary Clinton in dramatic fashion.”