He said the same thing last week about suing Cruz if he doesn’t play nice, which is a weirdly conditional approach to the idea of someone whom you think is constitutionally ineligible becoming president. But we’ve been over that. Read this post if you missed it on Friday. What I want to know is what he means when he says the RNC should “intervene.” Intervene in what?

Ted Cruz is a totally unstable individual. He is the single biggest liar I’ve ever come across, in politics or otherwise, and I have seen some of the best of them. His statements are totally untrue and completely outrageous. It is hard to believe a person who proclaims to be a Christian could be so dishonest and lie so much…

One of the ways I can fight back is to bring a lawsuit against him relative to the fact that he was born in Canada and therefore cannot be President. If he doesn’t take down his false ads and retract his lies, I will do so immediately. Additionally, the RNC should intervene and if they don’t they are in default of their pledge to me.

I am the strongest on the borders and I will build a wall, and it will be a real wall. I am strongest on illegal immigration, strongest on ISIS, strongest on the military and I will take care of our Vets. I will end common core and preserve the second amendment. I will renegotiate our trade deals and bring our jobs back to our country. I am the only person who will Make America Great Again.

Read the full statement for a list of Cruz’s alleged lies about him. When he says “intervene,” does he mean the RNC should intervene to get Cruz to pull his ads? Or does he mean they should intervene in his lawsuit against Cruz, i.e. that the GOP should take it upon itself to find out in court if one of its top contenders is legally eligible for the presidency? And why, for the second time today, did he mention the RNC supposedly having broken its pledge? It sure does seem suddenly like Trump is eager to make the case that he’s no longer bound by his promise not to run third-party.

John Ziegler offers a theory on that:

@allahpundit AP this isn't about Trump going 3rd party, its about him not endorsing GOP Nom & creating dirty tricks narrative for convention

— John Ziegler (@Zigmanfreud) February 15, 2016

Good point. Trump’s image depends on him being seen as the consummate winner; if he loses to Cruz, he’ll need to explain how that possibly could have happened. The only tolerable excuse is that he was cheated — Cruz is ineligible, Cruz is lying about his record, Cruz gamed the vote in Iowa with dirty tricks, and so on. Maybe Trump’s even reached the point where, if it’s too late to go third-party, he can at least advise his supporters to stay home in November rather than support dirty cheater Ted Cruz as nominee. I remember Trump (or maybe one of his advisors) saying somewhere many months ago, maybe as earlier as last summer, that if he was destined to lose the nomination, he was going to take Jeb Bush down with him. The same logic may apply now to Cruz. That’s a bad deal for Trumpism in that Trump will have more leverage over the nominee if his endorsement is in play than if he’s rejected the GOP, but maybe Trump’s ego is now sufficiently bruised that revenge is the only option.

Speaking of which, D. Hawkins asks a good question. What ever happened to Cruz’s strategy of making nice with Trump in hopes of becoming his voters’ second choice? That strategy seems to have “failed” now that Trump’s calling him, ahem, “the single biggest liar I’ve ever come across.” My pal Karl points to this National Review piece from earlier this month explaining what went wrong:

Cruz felt confident that while the front-runner was energizing base voters, he wouldn’t ultimately win them over. So he stayed in Trump’s wake, banking on what he told allies would be a “natural transition” to his camp once conservatives determined that they liked Trump’s message but not the messenger.

There was another strategic reason that Cruz spent the first six months of Trump’s candidacy refusing to attack him: He was certain Bush would do it for him. Cruz and his team had long been convinced that because Bush needed to win New Hampshire — where Trump polls the strongest and where he is best organized — the former Florida governor would “go nuclear” on the billionaire real-estate mogul with the help of his super PAC’s $100 million war chest. In turn, Cruz’s team predicted, Trump would “go nuclear” on Bush, damaging both an anti-establishment threat and the man whom Cruz’s camp once projected to emerge from the establishment lane as his chief rival for the nomination.

Bush and his Super PAC Death Star would eventually blow Trump up, Cruz thought, at which point the millions of Trump fans out there would instantly become Cruz fans. But it never happened: Although Jeb began attacking Trump, his PAC focused on tearing down Rubio. “Trump is, frankly, other people’s problem,” Super PAC chief Mike Murphy famously told WaPo back in August. As the months dragged on and Iowa crept closer, Cruz eventually had no choice but to do it himself. His new strategy, as described by Ben Shapiro, is based on separating himself from Trump in terms of their conservative bona fides after having spent months hugging Trump to prove their shared disdain for the establishment. The problem is, the nastier this gets, the less Trump fans may be willing to embrace Cruz notwithstanding the fact that he and Trump are the “outsider” candidates. Can Cruz win the nomination if he’s anathema to establishmentarians and to not-very-conservative populists?