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New York — Donald Trump says he regrets retweeting an unflattering picture of the wife of arch-rival Ted Cruz, in a rare act of contrition from the Republican presidential frontrunner. Trump is in pole position to seize the Republican nomination but is doing poorly nationwide among women voters, polls show, and faced stern criticism from all sides in recent days after saying women who have illegal abortions should be “punished”, before he backtracked.
The billionaire real-estate mogul has been engaged in an increasingly personal war of words with Cruz, his nearest challenger in the Republican race for the White House, that even drew in their wives.
An anti-Trump political group unveiled a controversial campaign ad ahead of votes in Arizona and Utah last month that used a GQ magazine photograph of Trump’s wife Melania lying naked and handcuffed to a briefcase.
Cruz denied being behind the ad, which was accompanied by the words: “Meet Melania Trump, your next first lady.” Trump then retweeted a photo compilation of an unflattering photo of Cruz’s wife Heidi next to Melania, a Slovenian-American jewelry designer and former model.
“Yeah, it was a mistake,” Trump said of the retweet, talking to The New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, in a column published on Saturday.
“If I had to do it again, I wouldn’t have sent it.”
Meanwhile, President Barack Obama scathingly dismissed Trump’s foreign policy proposals on Friday and warned that the world was watching the upcoming US election.
At the end of a summit on nuclear security that Obama hosted in Washington, he was asked about Trump’s suggestion that Japan and South Korea develop their own nuclear weapons. “The statements you mentioned, what do they tell us?” Obama demanded, rhetorically.
“They tell us the person who made the statements doesn’t know much about foreign policy or nuclear policy or the Korean peninsula or the world generally.”
Trump, the Republican frontrunner, says he wants US allies to pay for more of their own defence and allow costly American forces to disengage from their regions. Obama damned this as naive and an abdication of American leadership that would upset close allies and make the world a more dangerous place.
“I’ve said before that, you know, people pay attention to American elections. What we do is really important to the rest of the world,” he said. “Our alliance with Japan and the Republic of Korea is one of the foundations, one of the cornerstones of our presence in the Asia-Pacific region,” he said.
“It has underwritten the peace and prosperity of that region. It has been an enormous boon to American commerce and American influence,” he said.
Obama added that concern about Trump’s comments had come up on the sidelines of his summit meetings with world leaders. — AFP
Online Reporter