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Ted Cruz Rails at 'Amoral,' 'Narcissist' Donald Trump Ahead of Critical Indiana Primary

Calling Trump an insecure "bully," the Texas senator unleashed a tirade against the Donald on Tuesday as the GOP frontrunner inches closer to winning the nomination.
Photo by Jim LoScalzo/EPA

Facing the potential end to his presidential prospects and an almost certain loss in the critical Indiana primary being held today, Ted Cruz unleashed on GOP frontrunner Donald Trump, calling him a "narcissist" and "pathological liar."

During a press conference on Tuesday as Indiana voters headed to the polls, Cruz pricked up the ears of tired campaign reporters by promising, "I'm gonna do something I haven't done for the entire campaign…. I'm gonna tell you what I really think of Donald Trump."

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What followed was an unusually frank and aggressive tirade against the man who is now in a position to potentially lock up the Republican nomination before the party's convention in July, which would put the final nail in the coffin for Cruz's campaign. The Texas senator has bet everything on Indiana's primary, holding more than a dozen events in the state in the last 48 hours.

Looking for any tool to stop Trump's rapid race toward the 1,237 delegates he'll need to clinch the nomination, Cruz has taken his campaign on some odd turns in recent days. First, he announced a deal with Ohio Governor John Kasich to stop Trump in the final primary contests — an alliance he later denied. Then he announced a vice presidential running mate, Carly Fiorina, last week — the first time a candidate has done so before winning the nomination since Ronald Reagan's failed 1976 bid for the presidency.

Related: Cruz and Kasich's Plan To Stop Trump Before Indiana's Primary Has Already Backfired

Yet Trump still leads Cruz in Indiana by 15 points, according to the most recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist poll. And while it is now mathematically impossible for Cruz to clinch the Republican nomination without a contested convention, Trump only needs to win 63 percent of the remaining delegates to win outright. After Tuesday's primary, that number could plummet to just over 50 percent.

With those prospects clearly weighing on him, Cruz ripped into Trump on Tuesday.

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"This man is a pathological liar," Cruz told reporters on Tuesday. "He doesn't know the difference between truth and lies, he lies [with] practically every word that comes out of his mouth. And in a pattern that I think is straight out of a psychology textbook, his response is to accuse everybody else of lying."

Cruz went on to call Trump a "narcissist" at a "level I don't think this country has ever seen. Donald Trump is such a narcissist that Barack Obama looks at him and goes, 'Dude, what's your problem?' Everything in Donald's world is about Donald."

Cruz went on to call Trump "utterly amoral" and said that he believes that Trump fits the textbook definition of a pathological liar.

"I say pathological because I think if you hooked him up a lie detector test, he could say one thing in the morning, one thing at noon and one thing in the evening, all contradictory, and he'd pass the lie detector test each time," Cruz said. "Whatever lie he's telling at that minute, he believes it."

Related: John Boehner Calls Ted Cruz 'Lucifer in the Flesh,' a 'Miserable Son of a Bitch'

Although the senator has hardly kept his disdain for Trump quiet in recent months, Cruz's outburst marks a low point in the slow decline in his relationship with Trump. The two candidates spent the early part of the presidential campaign in an unspoken truce, in which each man held their venom for the other candidates and largely praised one another.

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The Establishment's only hope: Trump & me in a cage match.

Sorry to disappoint -- — Ted Cruz (@tedcruz)December 11, 2015

But as the race has narrowed, both candidates have turned on one another. Though cracks were already beginning to show, the true end to their accord came in late March, when Trump threatened to "spill the beans" on Cruz's wife, Heidi. Although he never followed up on the threat, Trump later retweeted an unflattering photo of Heidi Cruz next to an image of his wife, Melania, who is a former model, with the caption "the images are worth a thousand words."

Cruz dredged up the controversy again on Tuesday.

"Morality does not exist for him," he said. "It's why he went after Heidi directly and smeared my wife, attacked her. Apparently she's not pretty enough for Donald Trump. I may be biased, but I think if he's making that allegation, he's also legally blind."

Cruz also called Trump a "bully," arguing that his aggressive tendencies "come from a deep, yawning cavern of insecurity."

"There's a reason Donald Trump builds giant buildings and puts his name on them everywhere he goes," Cruz said. "And I will say, there are millions of people in this country who are angry, they're angry at Washington, they're angry at politicians who've lied to them. I understand that anger. I share that anger. And Donald is cynically exploiting that anger and he is lying to his supporters."

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Related: Cruz May Be Losing, But He's Still Choosing Carly Fiorina as His Running Mate

Trump responded in a statement not long after Cruz's remarks went viral on social media, calling the senator "desperate," adding somewhat ironically that Cruz "does not have the temperament to be President of the United States."

"Over the last week, I have watched Lyin' Ted become more and more unhinged as he is unable to react under the pressure and stress of losing, in all cases by landslides, the last six primary elections --- in fact, coming in last place in all but one of them," Trump said.

On Tuesday night, that number is likely to grow to seven and Cruz's chances of beating Trump for the Republican nomination will slip even further away from his grasp.

Follow Sarah Mimms on Twitter: @SarahMMimms