Ted Cruz to Trump: 'You're a sniveling coward, leave Heidi the hell alone.'

Ted Cruz is angry.

The Texas senator, who's trailing Donald Trump in his seemingly unstoppable quest for the Republican nomination, responded angrily on Thursday to the businessman's tweet about Heidi Cruz.

"It's not easy to tick me off. I don't get angry often. But you mess with my wife, you mess with my kids, that'll do it every time," Cruz said to the assembled press. "Donald, you're a sniveling coward, leave Heidi the hell alone."

Watch the magical moment, courtesy of MSNBC.

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Asked by a reporter off camera if he'd still support Trump should he be the party's nominee, Cruz deferred. "I'm going to beat him," the senator said with a pause, "for the nomination."

Backstory to the beef

Cruz's comments capped an escalating fight between the two presidential hopefuls that started last week and seemed to represent a new low, not only in the 2016 campaign, but also in Trump's war on women.

It was sparked when a pro-Cruz super PAC (called "Make America Awesome" — itself a dig at Trump's "Make America Great Again" campaign slogan) published an image containing a 16-year-old photo of Trump's wife, Melania Trump, posing nude and in handcuffs for the British version of GQ.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Trump didn't like it, and told Cruz to be careful, threatening to "spill the beans on your wife." This of course left journalists and Republican operatives wondering what "the beans" meant. At least one website claimed that Cruz's wife was a former call girl. Snopes says that theory is false.

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Cruz denied he had anything to do with the ad, tweeting, "Donald, if you try to attack Heidi, you're more of a coward than I thought." 

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Liz Mair, an operative who worked with Make America Awesome to produce the ad, responded on Twitter that Cruz was telling the truth.

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Trump, the next morning, called Cruz a liar.

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He then fired away, retweeting a supporter's image featuring the two mens' wives suggesting that Melania Trump was better looking than Heidi Cruz. "No need to 'spill the beans'," the ad read. "The images are worth a thousand words."

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That set Cruz off, tweeting in the middle of the night, "Donald, real men don't attack women." He added that Melania Trump was "lovely" and "Heidi is the love of my life."

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To CNN, he added, "She’s dealt with a lot of garbage in the business world... Heidi Cruz is not scared one iota by a bellowing Donald Trump."

And that brings us back to today, and the very first sentence of this post.

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