Trump steers clear of pejorative names for his rivals

by Ben Kamisar - 04/19/16 9:58 PM ET

Donald Trump’s victory speech lacked a popular fixture of most of his boisterous campaign rallies–pejorative nicknames for his rivals.

{mosads}The GOP front-runner, fresh off a victory in New York’s primary, traded in “Lyin’ Ted” for the more cordial “Senator Cruz.” He also referred to John Kasich with his “governor” honorific, despite having repeatedly chiding him in the campaign for sticking around in the race while he’s mathematically eliminated from winning the nomination before a contested convention.

But he still trumpeted his huge victory over both rivals.

“As you know, we’ve won millions of more votes than Sen. Cruz, millions and millions of more votes than Gov. Kasich,” Trump said at his victory rally at his Trump Tower in New York.

“We expect we are going to have an amazing number of weeks because these are places [with future primaries], they are in trouble.”

Immediately after the speech, MSBC’s Brian Williams asked his panel whether he believed the speech had been “Manafort-ed,” in reference to Trump’s recent hire of delegate guru Paul Manafort.

Steve Schmidt, the former top strategist to John McCain’s 2008 campaign, agreed with that assessment and applauded Trump’s tone as a shift toward the general election.

“It wasn’t ‘Lyin’ Ted,’ it was ‘Senator Cruz.’ So I think you are seeing him begin to address the temperament criticism and his talk was on message. the Trump message as he delivered it tonight, it was a potent and powerful one: making the economy great again,” he said on MSNBC.

“This is a potent general election message and even though he has some structural difficulty in the polls with monitories and women, no one should doubt the strength of that message.”

Tags Donald Trump John McCain