Uh oh. Ted Cruz is really in trouble with the New York Times now, after attacking Donald Trump for saying people should be able to use the restroom of whatever gender they now identify with. On the trail in Indiana on Saturday, reporter Trip Gabriel took time out of his packed schedule to deliver a condescending lecture to the ignorant locals about transgenders in “Cruz, in Indiana, Attacks Trump for Supporting Transgender Rights.” The online headline was harsh: Ted Cruz, Attacking Donald Trump, Uses Transgender Bathroom Access as Cudgel.” Columnist Gail Collins piled on: "Ted Cruz continues to astound. Every time it appears he can’t get more awful, he finds a new avenue, like a ground mole sniffing out a beetle."
As Senator Ted Cruz of Texas seeks every possible edge to stop Donald J. Trump, he has seized on a once-obscure issue with a proven power to inflame conservatives: letting transgender women use women’s bathrooms.
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Mr. Cruz has alternated between mockery and outrage nearly every day in highlighting Mr. Trump’s stance, seizing on it after Mr. Trump said last week that people should be free to “use the bathroom they feel is appropriate.” Mr. Trump was responding to the furor over a North Carolina law that stripped legal protections from gay and transgender people.
In leveraging the issue, Mr. Cruz has raised the specter of sexual predators in women’s restrooms, which conservatives around the country have effectively invoked to defeat anti-discrimination laws -- and which gay rights advocates denounce as a myth.
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Mr. Cruz hopes to use the issue to turn out social conservatives in Indiana, and interviews with voters at his rallies there showed a lack of acceptance of, or much knowledge about, transgender people.
“The Bible says he created them male and female, so therefore that’s what it’s supposed to be,” said Mike Haley, a retiree from Greenfield who supports Mr. Cruz.
His granddaughter Emily Haley, who works at an adoption agency and also plans to vote for Mr. Cruz, said it was “disgusting” to allow transgender women in women’s restrooms. “You’re asking for the rape rate to go up,” she said.
Gerri Nottingham, a nurse from Indianapolis, recalled Mr. Trump’s saying it would be too expensive to build separate restrooms, and she agreed. “If you’ve got that issue, just go home,” she advised. “You just have to plan.”
Ms. Nottingham, too, plans to vote for Mr. Cruz. She said she found it hard to accept that a person born one sex would identify as another. “I work in labor and delivery,” she said. “They come out one gender.”
On the same page, Megan Twohey worked mightily to wreck damage via Ted Cruz’s once-removed connection to an old scandal: “Cruz’s Father Worked For Supplements Maker That Was Sued by Investors.”
Gail Collins also tackled Cruz on the transgender issue in her Saturday column, “The One Thing Worse Than Trump.”
Ted Cruz continues to astound. Every time it appears he can’t get more awful, he finds a new avenue, like a ground mole sniffing out a beetle. Right now, he’s in Indiana, trying to save his presidential career by ranting about transgender people and bathrooms.
“Even if Donald Trump dresses up as Hillary Clinton, he shouldn’t be using the girls’ restroom,” Cruz declaimed at a rally. It’s his new favorite line. He is constantly reminding Republican voters that Trump, when asked which bathroom transgender people should use, simply replied the one that they felt most appropriate.
That was possibly the most rational moment of the Trump campaign, and of course he has since started fudging on it. But not enough for Cruz, who has earned the distinction of being a presidential candidate who can make Donald Trump look good. “I get along with almost everybody, but I have never worked with a more miserable son of a bitch in my life,” said the former House speaker, John Boehner. He also called Cruz “Lucifer in the flesh.”
Collins went over the top about Cruz having the nerve to bring his children along the trail with him.
Cruz has been dragging the children, 5 and 8, into his campaign a lot. It appears they now spend their days on a bus with Carly Fiorina and being trotted onstage by Dad -- before he gets to the part about Donald Trump cross-dressing in the girls’ restroom. They’ve also starred in a TV campaign ad reading from a mock Christmas book called “The Grinch Who Lost Her Emails.”
Free the Cruz Kids.
Saturday’s paper also downplayed some Trump news that could prove damaging to Democrats and the issue of amnesty for illegals, which the Times embraces. Jonathan Martin and Adam Nagourney were awfully cavalier about immigrant activists trying to shut down a Trump campaign rally on Friday in Burlingame, California: “Mocking Critics, Trump Says Unity Isn’t Necessary.” They did note that protesters were waving Mexican flags while burning an American flag.
Newsbusters amusingly quoted the Los Angeles Times fretting that some people might get the wrong idea if they’d seen what happened outside an earlier Trump rally on Thursday night in Costa Mesa, California, when protesters threw rocks and overturned police cars while waving Mexican flags. But people who read the actual New York Times paper might not have been troubled at all, because the NYT's decent story from the violent protest apparently didn’t make it into print.
One last swing: Reporter Alan Rappeport casually referenced in a Friday online story that a hard-left group, ANSWER had organized a protest of Trump’s Costa Mesa rally and that “A Trump piñata will be smashed to mark the occasion”
Rappeport apparently didn’t read the Times’ aggrieved editorial from March calling a Republican a thug for daring to use the word “piñata” as a metaphor. Yet apparently when you actually build them and use them (and are a liberal protest group) everything is cool.
