GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz said Monday that he has "zero interest whatsoever" in becoming Donald Trump's running mate, and he believes that it's his campaign has the momentum in the remaining primaries.
"There are a lot of reasons, but perhaps the simplest is, if Donald Trump is the nominee, Hillary [Clinton] wins. Hillary wins by double digits," the Texas senator said during a town hall meeting held in New York City during ABC's
"Good Morning America" program.
"I don't think there's anything we can do to change that."
Cruz continued that out of the 17 GOP candidates who started the race, five are supporting his campaign.
"We have been supported now by Rick Perry, Lindsey Graham, Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Carly Fiorina," said Cruz. "All of us started out as opponents . . . If I'm the nominee, I'll beat Hillary Clinton.
"We're beating in key swing states, we're beating her with young people and we have got to win. We can't do four, eight years on the road we're on right now."
Cruz over the weekend picked up another 14 delegates in Wyoming, leading to more claims by Trump that the delegate system is "rigged" when it doesn't include primaries with the general public voting.
On Monday, the Texas senator said Trump's complaints are because the "doesn't handle losing well."
"A total of five states voted in the last five weeks," said Cruz. "Utah, North Dakota, Wisconsin, Colorado and Wyoming, 1.3 million people voted in that state. He has lost all five. We have won all five. He's upset."
And even though Trump is favored to win in Tuesday's New York primary, Cruz said he does not believe his rival will ever become the GOP presidential nominee.
"In five states in a row, we have won landslides over and over," said Cruz. "In all likelihood, we're going to go into a contested convention which means nobody has a majority. It's going to be a battle in Cleveland to see who can get to a majority."
Further, said Cruz, he believes that Trump's highest total of delegates "will be on the first ballot" of this summer's convention. "He'll steadily go down."
Cruz also defended his comments about "New York values" to the town hall's New Yorkers.
"The phrase New York values actually didn't come from me, it came from Donald Trump," said Cruz. "From an interview he gave a number of years ago where he was explaining his support for partial birth abortion. So I was repeating Donald's own phrasing."
And New Yorkers, he continued, have "all suffered under the left-wing democratic policies year after year after year by politicians who aren't listening to you."
Cruz also defended his stance on religious liberty laws, in response to an audience member who asked what he'd do to protect him and his husband, saying that such laws "protect everyone of us."
"It applies to Christians, Jews, Muslims and all of us. We want to live in a world where we don't have the government dictating our beliefs, dictating how we live," said Cruz. "We have a right to live how according to our conscience, and that freedom protects each and every one of us."
He also repeated his belief that, as a constitutionalist, marriage is a matter for states to determine, not the federal government.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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