By Stephen Collinson
CNN
[Breaking news update, posted at 7:05 p.m. ET]
Donald Trump will win the Indiana Republican primary, according to a CNN projection. The victory places him on the cusp of clinching the GOP nomination.
[Previous story, posted at 5:40 p.m. ET]
Ted Cruz couldn’t take it anymore.
After weeks of personal attacks from Donald Trump, including fresh insinuations that his father was associated with Lee Harvey Oswald, Cruz boiled over Tuesday.
“I’m going to tell you what I really think of Donald Trump,” he told reporters at a news conference.
He then lit into Trump in terms that were sharply personal — even for the already rollicking 2016 Republican primary.
Cruz blasted Trump as a “pathological liar,” “utterly amoral,” “a narcissist at a level I don’t think this country’s ever seen” and “a serial philanderer.”
Cruz’s heated comments underscore just how important the Indiana contest is to his campaign and reflect his effort to put everything he’s got into the race before the polls close in most of the state at 6 p.m. They also reflect the increasingly personal nature of the battle between Cruz and Trump.
He unleashed his full arsenal of insults in his attack on Trump.
“He is proud of being a serial philanderer … he describes his own battles with venereal diseases as his own personal Vietnam,” Cruz said, citing a decades-old Trump appearance on “The Howard Stern Show.”
“This man is a pathological liar, he doesn’t know the difference between truth and lies … in a pattern that is straight out of a psychology text book, he accuses everyone of lying,” Cruz said as Indiana voters headed to cast their ballots. “Whatever lie he’s telling, at that minute he believes it … the man is utterly immoral,” Cruz said.