Donald Trump has a fallback option for his main GOP opponent, Ted Cruz, in case the Texas senator comes up short in his bid to capture the Republican nomination for president of the United States: become Canada’s prime minister.
At least that’s what the GOP front-runner tweeted Friday night in his latest swipe at his closest competitor, who was born in Canada.
“Cruz did not renounce his Canadian citizenship as a US Senator- only when he started to run for #POTUS. He could be Canadian Prime Minister,” Trump tweeted.
Trump has repeatedly questioned Cruz’s eligibility to be president of the United States, even though legal scholars widely agree that Cruz, who was born in Calgary, Alberta, to an American mother, is eligible for the White House.
The Texas Republican, a natural-born U.S. citizen, also had Canadian citizenship until he renounced it in 2014.
A lawsuit was filed in Texas earlier this month over whether Cruz can run for president. And Trump has often cited Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe, who said that although Cruz is generally accepted to be a natural-born citizen, no court has definitively ruled on the question.
“It’s a serious cloud,” Tribe told CNN’s Anderson Cooper last week. “It has to be taken seriously. It’s not just a matter of coming up with great talking points or winning some debate. I think he does a disservice to the Constitution and the country when he thinks he can slide his way, slip slide his way around this serious constitutional issue.”
Trump has used the citizenship question to hammer Cruz, and the issue has gained some traction among GOP voters. A Monmouth University poll released Wednesday found more than a third of Republican voters question Cruz’s eligibility to be president, and a Fox News poll released Friday found 10% of Republican primary voters say the fact Cruz was born outside the U.S. makes them less likely to vote for him.