Sen. Ted Cruz isn’t happy with the coverage of his two-day trip to New Hampshire this weekend, arguing that the media focused more on a cute moment with a little girl rather than the large crowd that turned out to his event.
The likely presidential hopeful took to “Morning Joe” on MSNBC on Tuesday to blast what he considered skewed media reports.
“The local press all covered the substance of what I said, the reactions of what happened,” Cruz said. “National press, it was all about the little girl and me terrifying her. You can literally read the story side by side as if they’re covering Mars and Venus.”
While speaking at an event hosted by the Strafford County GOP in Barrington, New Hampshire on Sunday, Cruz rhetorically argued that “the whole world is on fire” because the “Obama-Clinton foreign policy of leading from behind.”
That’s when a little girl in the front row spoke up: “The world is on fire?”
“The world is on fire — yes! Your world is on fire,” he said. “But you know what? Your mommy’s here and everyone’s here to make sure that the world you grow up in is even better.”
It was a colorful moment that got attention in the press and served as the anecdotal lead in an analysis piece by CNN.
The mother of the girl later told the media that her daughter was not scared by Cruz’s remarks, as some outlets framed it. Cruz joked about the incident during an appearance on “Late Night” with Seth Meyers Monday.
‘In the last 24 hours there’ve been 50 media stories that say Cruz terrified little girl, by the end of it I was Freddy Krueger. I had finger nails,” he said.
“I think in the end that girl’s problem isn’t anything more than her mother doesn’t know what three-year-olds like to do on a Saturday. ‘Let’s go watch a senator talk.’ I hope she got ice cream on the way there and the way home,” Meyers said.