Rick Perry is not “getting out of the race” as Donald Trump suggested Thursday during a news conference.
“You know a broken clock is right once a day,” Perry said. “The bottom line is I’m still here, I’m still workin’. We need to be talking about solutions and not just rhetoric out there.”
The former Texas governor quickly shot down Trump’s claim during an interview Thursday with Fox News that immediately followed a Trump press conference. The GOP front-runner claimed Perry, whose campaign is struggling, is dropping out of the race.
“One of the things that I’m most honored about is that so far everybody who’s attacked me has gone down the tubes,” Trump said. “You had Perry attacking me, now he’s getting out of the race.”
While Perry is not dropping out of the race, his campaign is in dire straits.
He was forced to stop paying his campaign staff last month due to lackluster fundraising and has since lost his top operatives in the crucial early states of Iowa and New Hampshire. In Iowa, Perry’s top adviser ditched his campaign and signed on with Trump.
Perry insisted there is “a long time until this election is over” and pointed out that Rudy Giuliani was the GOP front-runner early on during the 2008 primary process, but was nowhere to be seen come the party’s nominating convention.