Donald Trump on Tuesday took credit for knocking Gov. Scott Walker (R-Wis.) out of the GOP presidential primary.
“We sent him packing like a little boy,” he told radio co-hosts Michael Koolidge and Riley O’Neil on 1440 WROK, as first reported by BuzzFeed. “I’m the one that revealed his weaknesses. I’m the one that when he got out, he said, ‘Stop him, we must stop him.’
{mosads}“He was favored to win, and by the time I got finished with him he was dropping out of the race. He was my opponent, and he hit me very hard. I took care of him. Literally in one week he was out of the race.”
Trump argued that he undermined Walker by blasting him over a $2.2 billion budget deficit in Wisconsin.
“You had a $2.2 billion budget deficit and the schools were going begging and everything was going begging, but he didn’t want to raise taxes because he was going to run for president,” he said. “So instead he cut back on schools and he cut back on highways and he cut back on all sorts of things.
“[Wisconsin is] losing jobs all over the place,” the Republican presidential front-runner added. “He walked out in disgrace. I’m surprised he has any juice left in Wisconsin.”
Walker on Tuesday endorsed Ted Cruz, giving the Texas senator a boost before the Badger State’s GOP presidential primary next week.
“Ted Cruz is the best positioned by far to both win the nomination of the Republican Party and to then go on and defeat [Democratic presidential front-runner] Hillary Clinton in the fall of this year,” he said. “That’s the key.”
Cruz leads Trump by less than 1 percentage point a week out from Wisconsin’s voting contest, according to the latest RealClearPolitics average of polls.
Walker suspended his own GOP presidential campaign last year, arguing that other long-shot contenders should do the same so that Trump did not win the party’s nomination.