Donald Trump took a break from insulting South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham in order to aim some of his insults at another fellow Republican presidential contender: Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry.
Trump called out Perry as a “hypocrite!” in an Instagram post Wednesday that showed the two men meeting at Trump’s office last cycle when Perry ran for president — Trump said Perry was “playing nice and begging for my support and money.”
The Instagram post came one day after Perry aides retweeted several tweets Trump posted in 2011 and 2012 that praised the Republican governor of Texas.
The pair first sparred over Trump’s comments about illegal immigration, in which the real estate mogul broadly described Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists, but the feud took on an even brighter shade of red hot anger after Trump on Saturday questioned Republican Sen. John McCain’s status as a war hero at an Iowa presidential forum.
Perry was the first in the GOP presidential field to criticize Trump for those remarks, labeling Trump’s comments as “disgraceful.”
And Perry described Trump’s political appeal this week as “the cancer of Trump-ism,” which he also called “a toxic mix of demagoguery and nonsense.”
Trump fired back at Perry on Tuesday, tweeting that the former Texas governor “did an absolutely horrible job of securing the border. He should be ashamed of himself.”
Nearly every Republican presidential candidate has called out Trump over his remarks about immigrants and in particular over his questioning of McCain’s war record.
And Perry isn’t the only one whose tussle with Trump appears to be getting personal.
After Graham called Trump a “jackass,” Trump fired back with his textbook unorthodoxy, reading out Graham’s personal cell phone number on Tuesday during a rally in Graham’s home state.
